Nadaleen Singh

The Na­tion­al En­er­gy Cor­po­ra­tion (NEC) has de­vel­oped plans to strate­gi­cal­ly po­si­tion the port at Ga­le­o­ta as a pre­ferred re­gion­al lo­gis­tics hub. Ger­ry Brooks, chair­man of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny Group of Com­pa­nies (NGC), NEC's par­ent com­pa­ny, said the aim is to have a port op­er­at­ing mod­el that im­proves ef­fi­cien­cy.

He said the first phase of the Ga­le­o­ta port project, which was com­plet­ed in 2014 at a cost of US $100 mil­lion, will be­come ful­ly op­er­a­tionalised in 2017 at a cost US$18.6 mil­lion. There have been firm ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est from in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al mar­itime play­ers, he added.

Brooks, who spoke at the Caribbean Ship­ping As­so­ci­a­tion's AGM and Con­fer­ence which end­ed yes­ter­day at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain, said the fa­cil­i­ty will pro­vide lo­gis­ti­cal sup­port for new ex­plo­ration work in ad­di­tion its cur­rent role in main­tain­ing ser­vices for plat­forms.

He said the sec­ond phase of the port of Ga­le­o­ta project in­cludes cre­at­ing a dredge depth of 12.8 me­tres and a to­tal of 995 me­ters of quay wall space to cater to the needs of 60,000 tonne dead­weight ton­nage ships. This will al­low for ex­pand­ed ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion of oil and gas in Suri­name, French Guiana, Guyana as well as lo­cal deep­wa­ter ac­tiv­i­ty, cre­at­ing em­ploy­ment and boost­ing the ma­rine in­dus­try in the South-east­ern penin­su­la.

The ex­pect­ed time­line for com­ple­tion of con­struc­tion is the fourth quar­ter of 2019 at a bud­get­ed cost of US$130 mil­lion.

In re­la­tion to the port of Brighton and Labid­co in­dus­tri­al clus­ter, Brooks said with the Ju­niper plat­form ex­pect­ed to come on stream by the third quar­ter in 2017, "it is ex­pect­ed that the fields will pro­duce ap­prox­i­mate­ly 590 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet a day to meet the de­mands of the lo­cal down­stream in­dus­try, elec­tri­cal pow­er gen­er­a­tion sup­ply, At­lantic LNG as well as oth­er strate­gic gas-based projects with the in­tent of re­vers­ing the short­fall in sup­ply that clients on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate are cur­rent­ly fac­ing."

He said de­vel­oped port in­fra­struc­ture in­creas­es prospects for ma­jor ship­ping lines us­ing T&T's port fa­cil­i­ties as a hub serv­ing ad­ja­cent ports with shal­low nat­ur­al drafts in Suri­name, Guyana and Venezuela.

"We have been ac­tive­ly work­ing with our Guyanese coun­ter­parts to iden­ti­fy all ar­eas for col­lab­o­ra­tion and fur­ther de­vel­op­ment. These op­por­tu­ni­ties may in­clude the trans­porta­tion, pro­cess­ing and frac­tion­a­tion fa­cil­i­ties for any sub­stan­ti­at­ed nat­ur­al gas, as well as util­i­sa­tion of our ex­ist­ing port fa­cil­i­ties dur­ing ex­plo­ration works," Brooks said.