Sean Nero

Prof­its at state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) have in­creased by more than 200 per cent over the past four years, its chair­man Roop Chan Chadeesingh has said.Chadeesingh said the jump in rev­enue by the state en­ter­prise was a di­rect re­sult of the ef­fec­tive pol­i­cy de­ci­sions tak­en by the board and the qual­i­ty work of the ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment team.

He was speak­ing at Mon­day's me­dia con­fer­ence held at Jaf­fa Restau­rant, Queen's Park Oval, on Tra­garete Road, Port-of-Spain, to an­nounce the com­pa­ny's in­creased al­lo­ca­tion to the Ari­ma race Club's Re­pub­lic Day Der­by at San­ta Rosa Park, Ari­ma.

"Nat­ur­al gas is in­volved in every­thing that is pos­i­tive for T&T. We all know that Petrotrin is not do­ing too well re­cent­ly and the NGC is the flag­ship com­pa­ny of T&T. This year was our best year in terms of rev­enue. This year, be­fore tax­es, we made $8.39 bil­lion in prof­its. I don't want to blow our own trum­pet, but when we took over in 2010, prof­its were $3.9 bil­lion be­fore tax­es," he said.

Chadeesingh added, "NGC cur­rent­ly pro­duces about four bil­lion cu­bic feet of gas. Two bil­lion goes to At­lantic where we have four trains that sell en­er­gy to the whole world. The oth­er two bil­lion comes to the in­dus­tri­al es­tate in Point Lisas and out of Point Fortin, we have a num­ber of plants: urea, am­mo­nia and methanol plants. We sup­ply gas to the steel plant. We sup­ply gas to Pow­er­Gen. All of our pow­er in T&T comes from nat­ur­al gas."

The en­er­gy of­fi­cial praised the vi­sion of Er­rol Ma­habir, for­mer min­is­ter of pe­tro­le­um and mines un­der the Er­ic Williams ad­min­is­tra­tion, who four decades ago, pi­o­neered the idea of an en­er­gy es­tate.