DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.TT

Trinidad and To­ba­go is one step clos­er to ac­cess­ing Venezuela’s nat­ur­al gas re­sources fol­low­ing the sign­ing of agree­ments in Cara­cas, Venezuela on Wednes­day night, which was wel­comed by two busi­ness groups and a for­mer min­is­ter of en­er­gy on Thurs­day.

The agree­ments were signed by T&T’s Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young and Venezuela’s Oil Min­is­ter Pe­dro Tel­lechea at the Mi­raflo­res Palace, the of­fi­cial res­i­dence of Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro, who wit­nessed the sign­ing.

On his Face­book page, Young said the agree­ments were for the joint ex­ploita­tion of gas in the ter­ri­to­r­i­al wa­ters shared by both coun­tries, while US busi­ness news com­pa­ny, Bloomberg, quot­ed Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro as say­ing the coun­tries signed “a prof­it-shar­ing agree­ment” to ex­port gas from the PDVSA-owned Drag­on off­shore project. PDVSA is Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas com­pa­ny.

The deal will fa­cil­i­tate the in­stal­la­tion of pipelines to move nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela to Trinidad, ac­cord­ing to TeleSUR, the Cara­cas-based, Latin Amer­i­can ter­res­tri­al and satel­lite news tele­vi­sion net­work.

In wel­com­ing the sign­ing, T&T En­er­gy Cham­ber said it was ex­treme­ly pleased to hear the news that the two coun­tries signed the agree­ment to work on the Drag­on field in Venezue­lan wa­ters.

“The En­er­gy Cham­ber con­grat­u­lates the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go for de­liv­er­ing this agree­ment, and in par­tic­u­lar the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, the Ho­n­ourable Stu­art Young, who has worked tire­less­ly to se­cure the agree­ment in a very chal­leng­ing en­vi­ron­ment,” said the En­er­gy Cham­ber.

“This marks an im­por­tant mile­stone in the plans to im­port nat­ur­al gas by pipeline from Venezuela to Trinidad & To­ba­go, for on­ward pro­cess­ing and ex­port to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets as LNG and petro­chem­i­cals. Suc­cess­ful de­liv­ery of this ini­tia­tive will help sup­ply much need­ed en­er­gy, fer­tilis­ers and petro­chem­i­cals and as­sist glob­al en­er­gy and food se­cu­ri­ty,” said the group, whose mem­bers in­clude the com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing in T&T’s en­er­gy sec­tor.

AM­CHAM T&T al­so con­grat­u­lat­ed the Gov­ern­ment for its work and progress made in work­ing to­ward ac­cess­ing the Drag­on gas field.

“AM­CHAM T&T recog­nis­es the work of Prime Min­is­ter Dr the Hon Kei­th Row­ley and the Hon Stu­art Young, Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries who led the en­gage­ment on this mat­ter.

“We ap­pre­ci­ate that there are more steps re­quired be­fore op­er­a­tional­i­sa­tion can take place. How­ev­er, we are op­ti­mistic that this lat­est agree­ment has tak­en us one step clos­er to­ward this goal. We will con­tin­ue to sup­port these ef­forts in our en­gage­ments with both pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor lead­ers in T&T and the US,” said AM­CHAM T&T.

For­mer Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Kevin Ram­nar­ine wel­comed the agree­ments, but he said more in­for­ma­tion should have been pub­li­cised.

“Any progress that has been made with the Drag­on deal in the last cou­ple of days and so on is some­thing to wel­come. In my mind, we need some an­swers as to ex­act­ly what was signed or what was agreed to in Cara­cas a cou­ple days ago,” he said.

Ram­nar­ine said the Gov­ern­ment should dis­close what Min­is­ter Young com­mit­ted the pub­lic to when he signed the agree­ment. He al­so ques­tioned when nat­ur­al gas would be­gin to be pro­duced from the arrange­ment.

More­over, Ram­nar­ine re­mind­ed that the $1 bil­lion deal was first signed be­tween Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro in 2018. It in­volved the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC), Shell T&T and PDVSA.

In Jan­u­ary 2023, the US Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) grant­ed a two-year li­cence on the con­di­tion that no cash be paid to the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment’s state-owned en­ter­pris­es. This was met with re­sis­tance from the Span­ish speak­ing coun­try.