Last week Thurs­day, speak­ing at a post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann’s, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley likened the ne­go­ti­a­tions on the Drag­on nat­ur­al gas field to a “huge boul­der that we have been push­ing up a hill since 2018”.

“I think we have made some con­sid­er­able progress and, hope­ful­ly, as we move in­to 2024, we are op­ti­mistic that we might be able to work our way out of the stric­tures on the Drag­on mat­ter and, of course, our own deep­wa­ter op­er­a­tions here.”

The Prime Min­is­ter said Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young re­port­ed to the re­cent Cab­i­net re­treat that his min­istry had put in “a tremen­dous amount of ef­fort to en­sure a sus­tained gas sup­ply in this coun­try”.

Asked lat­er in the news con­fer­ence whether he was con­fi­dent that the “huge boul­der” would even­tu­al­ly get pushed over the hill, Row­ley said, “I am con­fi­dent that the ef­forts we are mak­ing are get­ting us clos­er and clos­er to the top of the hill. We have made a lot of ef­fort. Our Min­is­ter of En­er­gy has lit­er­al­ly been do­ing shut­tle work be­tween Wash­ing­ton DC and Cara­cas.”

Giv­en Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley’s ref­er­ence to 2024 and his op­ti­mism that this coun­try “might be able to work our way out of the stric­tures on the Drag­on mat­ter”, Wednes­day night’s sign­ing of agree­ments by Mr Young and his Venezue­lan coun­ter­part, Pe­dro Rafael Tel­lechea, for the joint ex­ploita­tion of the nat­ur­al gas is a huge and note­wor­thy diplo­mat­ic achieve­ment for the ad­min­is­tra­tion in Port-of-Spain.

While the de­tails of ex­act­ly what was signed were scarce up to last night, the fact that there was an agree­ment and a cer­e­mo­ny that took place at the Pres­i­den­tial Palace in Cara­cas and was broad­cast on tele­vi­sion in our South Amer­i­can neigh­bour, is a def­i­nite in­di­ca­tion that progress is be­ing made on this mat­ter.

More im­por­tant­ly, Wednes­day’s sign­ing is, as well, an in­di­ca­tion that the Venezue­lans are still very will­ing to en­gage with T&T in de­vel­op­ing the Drag­on nat­ur­al gas field to the mu­tu­al ben­e­fit of both coun­tries.

While T&T has been push­ing this “huge boul­der” up a hill since 2018, progress on get­ting Drag­on gas in­to the T&T pipeline in­fra­struc­ture was made when the US De­part­ment of Trea­sury grant­ed a two-year li­cence to T&T in Jan­u­ary this year to de­vel­op the Drag­on field in part­ner­ship with PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned nat­ur­al gas and oil com­pa­ny.

The “stric­tures” re­ferred to by the T&T Prime Min­is­ter eight days ago, no doubt, in­clude a con­di­tion of the li­cence that pre­vents the ad­min­is­tra­tion in Venezuela from re­ceiv­ing any cash pay­ments from the Drag­on project.

Ad­vanc­ing this project would be much eas­i­er if the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion were to drop this con­di­tion­al­i­ty. But the cur­rent geopo­lit­i­cal re­al­i­ties of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween Cara­cas and Wash­ing­ton DC make that a re­mote pos­si­bil­i­ty ... at this time.

But in a world where cryp­tocur­ren­cies are a re­al­i­ty—and Cen­tral Bank Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cies have been in­tro­duced in Ja­maica, The Ba­hamas and the East­ern Caribbean—it is cer­tain­ly not far-fetched to imag­ine a pay­ment regime for Drag­on gas in the fu­ture that adopts 21st cen­tu­ry in­no­va­tions.

The sign­ing this week sig­nals that while “stric­tures” re­main, the joint ef­forts of T&T and Venezuela, along with this coun­try’s Cari­com part­ners, could re­sult in the Drag­on danc­ing af­ter all.