Richard?Lord

Time is run­ning out for state-owned Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (Petrotrin) to get its act to­geth­er and be­come a prof­itable en­ti­ty.

This is ac­cord­ing to En­er­gy Min­is­ter Nicole Olivierre in her ad­dress to the An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing (AGM) of the En­er­gy Cham­ber at Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, on Tues­day.

The cham­ber re-elect­ed its chair­man, Vin­cent Pereira, for a sec­ond one-year term yes­ter­day.

Olivierre said over the last five years oil and con­den­sate pro­duc­tion had fall­en to un­der 100,000 bar­rels per day, which she said was due to the lack of new dis­cov­er­ies and a re­duc­tion in con­den­sate pro­duc­tion which fell by as much as 17,400 bar­rels per day.

She not­ed that ex­cept for the lease op­er­a­tor­ship pro­gramme, crude oil pro­duc­tion had been stag­nant, adding that Petrotrin "has failed to en­gen­der any sig­nif­i­cant in­creased pro­duc­tion in its port­fo­lio."

Olivierre said, "It is there­fore time to take a se­ri­ous look at Petrotrin to de­ter­mine its ca­pa­bil­i­ty to ex­ploit its hy­dro­car­bon re­sources."

She said the first re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the new board, led by An­drew Jupiter, would be "to con­duct an as­sess­ment of Petrotrin's ca­pa­bil­i­ty and to chart the way for­ward."

She said that must be done with the un­der­stand­ing that "the coun­try can­not wait for­ev­er for the com­pa­ny to get its act to­geth­er." She in­sist­ed, "The clock is count­ing down on Petrotrin."

She al­so spoke about the amount of age­ing phys­i­cal en­er­gy as­sets in the coun­try. She said a full as­sets in­tegri­ty as­sess­ment "in the en­tire val­ue chain" would have to be con­duct­ed.

She said the min­istry would al­so ex­am­ine "the cur­rent se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ments for our crit­i­cal en­er­gy in­fra­struc­ture to en­sure a co­or­di­nat­ed and ef­fi­cient ap­proach to se­cur­ing our na­tion's en­er­gy in­fra­struc­ture."

She said au­dits of the Petrotrin re­fin­ery and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny would com­mence this week to de­ter­mine the full phys­i­cal as­sets of the re­spec­tive com­pa­nies. They would last for five months and the fi­nal re­port sub­mit­ted two months lat­er.

She said a to­tal of 30 com­pa­nies would be au­dit­ed. She said be­cause of the age of the in­fra­struc­ture "there is the need to have plans in place to ad­dress ma­jor oil spill events." To this end, the min­is­ter said, the Na­tion­al Oil Spills Con­tin­gency Plan would be ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed as soon as pos­si­ble. An im­ple­men­ta­tion com­mit­tee was cur­rent­ly be­ing es­tab­lished, she said.

Olivierre said T&T was not im­mune to the fall­out from low­er prices in the sec­tor and, con­se­quent­ly, it could not be busi­ness as usu­al and in­no­v­a­tive changes were re­quired to en­sure the sec­tor re­mained vi­able and pro­gres­sive.

She said the nat­ur­al gas mas­ter plan 2014-2020, pre­pared un­der the for­mer PP Gov­ern­ment, would be re­viewed in the light of the dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties of the new PNM Gov­ern­ment.

Olivierre said the Na­tion­al Lo­cal Con­tent Com­mit­tee would be re-ac­ti­vat­ed and giv­en the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to de­vel­op new leg­is­la­tion "for the max­imi­sa­tion of lo­cal con­tent in the do­mes­tic en­er­gy sec­tor."

MORE IN­FO

Petrotrin pres­i­dent Khalid Has­sanali, who at­tend­ed the AGM, was lat­er asked to com­ment on the need for in­fra­struc­ture up­grade at the com­pa­ny. He told re­porters it was es­ti­mat­ed to cost "be­tween $7 and $10 bil­lion to be able to up­grade all of those as­sets at this time. So it is a very her­culean task."

He said Petrotrin shared the min­is­ter's "ea­ger­ness to get things mov­ing."

Asked if the com­pa­ny could af­ford the up­grade, Has­sanali said the fig­ure he gave was an es­ti­mate, but the study would de­ter­mine the ex­act cost.

He said the cur­rent low oil prices had con­tributed to the ex­ist­ing op­er­at­ing chal­lenges. "Oil prices, over the years, have been up and down and this is to some ex­tent why we have had these prob­lems be­cause when we are on a down­turn there are sac­ri­fices made and that is why we have chal­lenges with our op­er­at­ing main­te­nance and so on."