Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

The long await­ed ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing (IPO) in Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors will be launched with­in the next few weeks, pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) In­dar Ma­haraj said on Tues­day night.Speak­ing with re­porters fol­low­ing a tour of NGC's fa­cil­i­ties at Point Lisas, Ma­haraj said the prospec­tus for the IPO has al­ready been sub­mit­ted to the Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion (SEC) for re­view.

"They will re­view the prospec­tus and send it back to us with their com­ments so we can make ad­just­ments. Then we wil send it back to them for a fi­nal re­view and once they are okay with it, they will au­tho­rize us to do the IPO. Once that hap­pens, the IPO will be launched," he said.Ma­haraj said the IPO would have been ready if is­sues had not arisen with the First Cit­i­zens Bank IPO? How­ev­er, he said, one it is launched cit­i­zens will have a fair op­por­tu­ni­ty to own part of T&T's en­er­gy sec­tor.

He said NGC pur­chased a 39 per cent stake in Phoenix Park for US$600 mil­lion from US oil gi­ant Cono­coPhillips in Sep­tem­ber 2013."We ac­quired the shares and in­vest­ed it in a TTNGL, a lo­cal com­pa­ny, and we there­fore start­ed the process of do­ing an ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 49 per cent of that 39 per cent to put in­to the pub­lic do­main," he said.He ex­plained that ear­li­er this year, NGC was giv­en au­tho­riza­tion to con­tin­ue with the IPO process.

Ma­haraj said NGC plans to ex­pand up­stream, mid­stream and down­stream. He said the com­pa­ny has been op­er­at­ing at 99.9 per cent re­li­a­bil­i­ty and the re­cent down­grade from Moody's in­vestors Ser­vices had noth­ing to do with the its per­for­mance. He al­so said NGC reaped hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in prof­its af­ter it start­ed mar­ket­ing its nat­ur­al gas. At present, 55 per cent of the gas pro­duced in T&T goes to the LNG trains in Point Fortin. NGC owns 10 per cent in Train 1 and 11 per cent in Train 4.

The pur­chase of the French-based glob­al en­er­gy op­er­a­tor To­tal's Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion (E&P) as­sets, priced at US$473 mil­lion, which was fi­nalised last Sep­tem­ber 30, "al­lowed NGC to have a 30 per cent share­hold­ing in Block 2 (c) and an 8.5 per cent in Block 3(a), which al­lows a pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 15,000 bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent per day and a gas vol­ume of 220 MM­scf/d," he said.

In ad­di­tion. NGC had deep­ened its in­volve­ment in the up­stream busi­ness which com­pris­es a 10 per cent share­hold­ing in the South East Coast Con­sor­tium (SECC), 20 per cent share­hold­ing in Trin­tomar and 15 per cent own­er­ship of the Teak, Samaan and Poui oil­fields lo­cat­ed east of Ma­yaro.

Ma­haraj said NGC has 120 light in­dus­tri­al cus­tomers who get nat­ur­al gas at sub­si­dized prices.