En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has fired back at Prime Min­is­ter of St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Dr Ralph Gon­salves, re­ject­ing com­ments that Trinidad and To­ba­go’s cur­ren­cy is equiv­a­lent to “mo­nop­oly mon­ey.”

He did so as he out­lined a se­ries of en­er­gy ini­tia­tives aimed at re­build­ing T&T’s for­eign ex­change base.

Ad­dress­ing par­tic­i­pants at the en­er­gy sym­po­sium Re­ju­ve­nat­ing Our Ma­ture Fields and Basins at the Cara Suites Ho­tel yes­ter­day, Mooni­lal de­scribed Gon­salves’ re­marks as un­help­ful and point­ed to struc­tur­al re­forms and pro­duc­tion in­creas­es that the T&T Gov­ern­ment is un­der­tak­ing to re­verse the for­eign ex­change cri­sis.

“Maybe Prime Min­is­ter Gon­salves should have shared his wis­dom with his col­leagues who were re­spon­si­ble for the col­lapse of our econ­o­my and the short­age of for­eign ex­change,” Mooni­lal said, adding, “It is a pity that the Prime Min­is­ter of St Vin­cent did not share his think­ing with the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion over the last decade, which could have re­versed this cri­sis.”

Gon­salves, in a re­cent pub­lic state­ment, had crit­i­cised T&T’s for­eign ex­change pay­ment prac­tices in Cari­com trade, stat­ing: “We pay in hard for­eign cur­ren­cy. Our coun­try pays Trinidad and To­ba­go an­nu­al­ly in ex­cess of US $65 mil­lion ... Our traders are paid in Trinidad and To­ba­go dol­lars, which are not con­vert­ible out­side of Trinidad and To­ba­go ... they may as well bring up mo­nop­oly mon­ey.”

But Mooni­lal said his Gov­ern­ment had moved with ur­gency to sta­bilise and in­crease oil and gas pro­duc­tion, which re­mains the main source of for­eign ex­change for T&T.

“The out­look for oil in the short to medi­um term is pos­i­tive,” he said. “There are a num­ber of gas fields com­ing on stream in the near term which are rich in con­den­sate.”

He cit­ed sev­er­al cur­rent and fu­ture projects, in­clud­ing the Men­to De­vel­op­ment—a joint ef­fort be­tween EOG and BPTT—which be­gan pro­duc­tion in May 2025 and is ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er 8,200 bar­rels of oil per day at peak. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, workovers by Peren­co in the Poui field are fore­cast­ed to add 2,900 bar­rels per day in ear­ly 2026.

“Crude oil from Her­itage’s Off­shore East Sol­da­do Field De­vel­op­ment is al­so ex­pect­ed to reach peak pro­duc­tion at a rate of 8,200 bar­rels per day,” he said. He added that oth­er projects, such as the Co­conut field and the Beryl dis­cov­ery, are in de­vel­op­ment and will push pro­duc­tion high­er over the next four years.

Mooni­lal ac­knowl­edged the nat­ur­al de­cline of ma­tur­ing reser­voirs but said the Gov­ern­ment is proac­tive­ly launch­ing projects to coun­ter­bal­ance that.

On the gas side, he said that the sec­tor had seen a drop in pro­duc­tion from 3.8 bil­lion cu­bic feet per day in 2015 to 2.54 bil­lion cu­bic feet per day at present.

How­ev­er, he out­lined a se­ries of up­com­ing projects de­signed to re­verse this de­cline.

“In April, the Cypre Phase 1 de­vel­op­ment came on stream with a peak pro­duc­tion of 350 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day,” he said. “This was fol­lowed by the de­liv­ery of first gas in May.”

He al­so high­light­ed that Shell’s Aphrodite and Man­a­tee gas projects are set to come on­line by 2027, with the Man­a­tee ini­tia­tive now be­ing up­grad­ed to “Man­a­tee Plus” with a ten per cent in­crease in an­tic­i­pat­ed out­put.

Mooni­lal said BPTT and Shell were re­cent­ly award­ed pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tracts for deep­wa­ter blocks, and seis­mic da­ta ac­qui­si­tion is un­der­way and is ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by Sep­tem­ber 2025.

He said these in­vest­ments and dis­cov­er­ies were gen­er­at­ing re­newed in­vestor con­fi­dence. “There has been strong and re­newed in­ter­est in the blocks with mul­ti­ple re­cent re­quests for da­ta and ad­di­tion­al time, par­tic­u­lar­ly by those com­pa­nies that are not cur­rent­ly op­er­at­ing in T&T,” he said.

How­ev­er, Mooni­lal al­so ad­dressed the lack of di­ver­si­ty among up­stream en­er­gy op­er­a­tors.

“We have not fa­cil­i­tat­ed di­ver­si­ty among the op­er­a­tors. This has re­sult­ed in lim­it­ed par­tic­i­pa­tion in our bid rounds ... We need new com­pa­nies in the up­stream side of our in­dus­try who will bring new ap­proach­es to do­ing things.”