The Gov­ern­ment and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny must come straight on the quar­ter-bil­lion dol­lars it spent try­ing to keep At­lantic LNG Train 1 in op­er­a­tion.

Sev­en months lat­er, the plant is shut down and not pro­duc­ing any LNG and ac­cord­ing to our re­port­ing, is to be shut down just like Petrotrin's Point-a-Pierre Re­fin­ery.

While for a mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar com­pa­ny like the NGC the loss of $250 mil­lion will not lead to it shut­ting down, one must con­sid­er that the mon­ey, if paid as a div­i­dend to the Gov­ern­ment, could have been used to pur­chase all the po­lice ve­hi­cles re­quest­ed, build four ad­di­tion­al po­lice sta­tions, or at least two brand new sec­ondary schools.

The ques­tions that have to be an­swered are clear:

Who ad­vised the board of the NGC and the Gov­ern­ment to make the in­vest­ment?

Why was it made in the face of the ma­jor own­ers say­ing they nei­ther had gas for the plant nor were pre­pared to place any mon­ey be­hind its up­grade?

Where did the NGC ex­pect to find gas for Train 1 in the short term?

Was there a risk that in seek­ing to sup­ply LNG, the NGC could be con­flict­ed by plac­ing it­self in com­pe­ti­tion for gas with its clients?

Was the de­ci­sion to make the in­vest­ment based on eco­nom­ics or pol­i­tics?

Who will ul­ti­mate­ly be held re­spon­si­ble if the mon­ey is even­tu­al­ly lost?

BPTT, which once pro­vid­ed 100 per cent of the gas for Train 1, has re­it­er­at­ed that it does not have the sup­plies and is fo­cused on the three oth­er trains or plants. It has al­so rub­bished any talk that the is­sue has arisen be­cause of any pow­er play be­tween it­self and the ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er, Roy­al Dutch Shell.

On Sat­ur­day, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young stat­ed that the Gov­ern­ment has been in dis­cus­sions for months with all of the share­hold­ers con­cern­ing the fu­ture of At­lantic LNG.

“These dis­cus­sions are on­go­ing and at a very sen­si­tive stage,” the En­er­gy Min­is­ter stat­ed.

We have been hear­ing this same re­frain from the Gov­ern­ment about the talks be­ing sen­si­tive.

In De­cem­ber last year, the late Franklyn Khan, who was then En­er­gy Min­is­ter, al­so said the talks were sen­si­tive.

He said then, “BP is say­ing that they have a short­age and they can­not sup­ply, but BP is not the on­ly sup­pli­er of gas in Trinidad, so we are in some sen­si­tive ne­go­ti­a­tions, let me make that point, with up­stream­ers to sup­ply gas to Train 1.”

Khan al­so promised the coun­try that Train 1 would have been op­er­at­ing now.

It was this news­pa­per that last year broke the sto­ry of the NGC spend­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to do the turn­around (up­grade) of Train 1.

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia’s re­port­ing then, the late Khan said the op­er­a­tion of Train 1 was de­pen­dent on the turn­around.

Well, the turn­around has hap­pened, the mon­ey spent and the plant re­mains idle.

How­ev­er, the coun­try needs some ex­pla­na­tion from the Gov­ern­ment as to where we are in this process? More im­por­tant­ly, it must al­so an­swer whether we can re­al­is­ti­cal­ly ex­pect the plant to restart and whether the mon­ey spent on its de­vel­op­ment is lost?