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Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Patriotic still wants Petrotrin refinery

by

Radhica De Silva
845 days ago
20230125

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

 

Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies di­rec­tor Ozzi War­wick says he is sur­prised by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s as­ser­tion that Gov­ern­ment can­not find a buy­er for Petrotrin’s Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery be­cause no­body is in­ter­est­ed in it.

Row­ley made the com­ment at a me­dia con­fer­ence on Tues­day where he an­nounced T&T had re­ceived per­mis­sion from the Unit­ed States to ac­cess the Drag­on Gas Field.

Ad­dress­ing the sta­tus of in­ter­est in the re­fin­ery, Row­ley said, “ We are talk­ing to every­body who knows that we have a re­fin­ery, if they’re in­ter­est­ed in it. But a re­fin­ery nowa­days is not some­thing that has a lot of peo­ple ex­cit­ed.

“But we hope that some day, some­one might be in­ter­est­ed and the fact that we can’t find any­body in­ter­est­ed should tell you some­thing ...”

How­ev­er, War­wick yes­ter­day con­firmed that Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies re­mains in­ter­est­ed.

The com­pa­ny, formed by the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU), had en­tered a bid for the re­fin­ery but the in­ter­est col­lapsed in Jan­u­ary 2021, af­ter their bids were re­ject­ed. At the time, Pa­tri­ot­ic said it had al­ready spent “tens of mil­lions of dol­lars” on the ac­qui­si­tion process, on­ly to be blanked by the gov­ern­ment.

But War­wick yes­ter­day said Pa­tri­ot­ic still has an in­ter­est and wel­comes ne­go­ti­a­tions.

“We have al­ways main­tained that Pa­tri­ot­ic re­mains ready, flex­i­ble and will­ing to en­ter in­to any agree­ment to safe­ly, ef­fi­cient­ly and cost-ef­fec­tive restart the re­fin­ery and put work­ers back to work,” War­wick said.

He re­it­er­at­ed that many com­mu­ni­ties will ben­e­fit if the re­fin­ery gets restart­ed.

“Com­mu­ni­ties and Trinidad and To­ba­go will ben­e­fit. With all this high un­em­ploy­ment and idle hu­man re­source with an abun­dance of skilled and ex­pe­ri­enced work­ers, there can be no bet­ter time than now to restart the re­fin­ery,” he said.

The Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery was closed in 2018 due to loss­es of more than $1 bil­lion in the pre­vi­ous five years. The clo­sure af­fect­ed 2,600 per­ma­nent jobs, in­clud­ing 1,700 di­rect jobs. At the time of the clo­sure, the fa­cil­i­ty had a pro­cess­ing ca­pac­i­ty of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 140,000 bar­rels per day (bpd) of crude.

In May last year, Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young said ne­go­ti­a­tions were on­go­ing with Quan­ten LLC, an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny which was en­gaged in the re­quest for pro­pos­al process for the re­fin­ery.

On De­cem­ber 9, 2022, Row­ley con­firmed in Par­lia­ment that talks be­tween Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ing Lim­it­ed and Quan­ten LLC on restart­ing the re­fin­ery were ter­mi­nat­ed on De­cem­ber 5. He said TPHL had fol­lowed due dili­gence in ex­plor­ing Quan­ten’s in­ter­est in the re­fin­ery but the process “didn’t de­liv­er a work­able, us­able so­lu­tion.”.

As of De­cem­ber 5, he said TPHL wasn’t in talks with any par­ty for the pur­chase of the re­fin­ery and “the door was still open,” and TPHL would con­tin­ue ex­plor­ing any in­ter­est­ed en­ti­ties, in­clud­ing re­gion­al­ly.

Since the clo­sure of the re­fin­ery, there have al­so been short­ages of bi­tu­men, which is used for road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion.

As a re­sult of this, since 2018, the Gov­ern­ment and con­trac­tors have been forced to im­port bi­tu­men, which is used by Lake As­phalt to pro­duce as­phalt ce­ment. Bi­tu­men is a by-prod­uct of crude oil and is pro­duced through a re­fin­ing process, ac­cord­ing to in­vesto­pe­dia.com.

Over the week­end, Works Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said the Gov­ern­ment is mov­ing to­wards al­le­vi­at­ing the bi­tu­men short­ages which have ham­pered road paving.

“Part of the pro­gramme that the min­istry em­barked up­on is an im­proved stor­age fa­cil­i­ty at Lake As­phalt. We have been op­er­at­ing where we pro­duce TLA from the lake and mix­ing it with bi­tu­men to pro­duce a high-qual­i­ty paving ma­te­r­i­al but one of the prob­lems was stor­age at Lake As­phalt and pro­duc­ing the vol­umes re­quired,” Sinanan said.

He said 20 new bitu­tain­ers were pur­chased to as­sist in the im­por­ta­tion of bi­tu­men and stor­age.

Sinanan said once the re­fin­ery is re­opened, T&T will no longer have to spend mil­lions to im­port bi­tu­men an­nu­al­ly.


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