State-owned Petrotrin has record­ed a loss of $533 mil­lion this year which is an im­prove�ment from $819 mil­lion last year. Pre­lim­i­nary unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial re­sults for the fi­nan­cial year end�ed Sep­tem­ber 30 show a drop in rev­enue of $3.2 bil­lion or 16 per cent com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year.

The en­er­gy com­pa­ny's unau­dit­ed net in­come im­proved by $286 mil­lion or 35 per cent which was the re­sult of low­er op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es.A me­dia re­lease from the com­pa­ny stat­ed that it con­tin­ues to meet its debt ser­vice, re­quired cap­i­tal ex�pen­di­ture and as­set main­te­nance oblig­a­tions with the sup­port of its share­hold­er.

"Since as­sum­ing of­fice one year ago, the new board of di­rec­tors is tak­ing the nec­es­sary steps to re­align cost and cap­i­tal re­quire­ments giv­en the pro­ject­ed low­er rev­enue streams due to the fall in oil prices–which de­creased by as much as 27 per cent for fis­cal 2016 com­pared to 2015."

Petrotrin's per­for­mance is claim�ing some note­wor­thy achieve­ments dur­ing the fis­cal year. These in­clude:

�2 Re­duc­tion in op­er­at­ing ex­pend�iture by $500 mil­lion from fis­cal 2015 to fis­cal 2016 in­clud­ing re�duc­tion in over­time.

�2 In­creased re­fin­ery uti­liza­tion from 55 per cent in 2015 to 73 per cent in 2016 and 15 per cent in­crease in prod­uct sales to the lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket.

"In ad­di­tion, the com­pa­ny is in de­tailed dis­cus­sion with all stake�hold­ers with re­spect to in­creas­ing crude pro­duc­tion from our Petrotrin Trin­mar Ma­rine Op­er­a­tions through a se­ries of in­ter­ven­tions aimed at un�lock­ing oil vol­umes in that op­er­a­tion.

"Oth­er ini­tia­tives in our land op�er­a­tions in­clude con­tin­ued drilling and work-over ac­tiv­i­ties based on on­go­ing seis­mic da­ta from re­cent sur­veys and a num­ber of en­hanced oil re­cov­ery ini­tia­tives based on steam and car­bon diox­ide in­jec­tion."

The com­pa­ny al­so ex­pects to re­al�ise in­creased re­fin­ery through­put for fis­cal 2017 which will re­sult in fur­ther in­creased prod­uct sales and rev­enue to the busi­ness. Petrotrin al­so con�tin­ues to fo­cus on as­set in­tegri­ty im­prove­ments and en­hanced safe­ty per­for­mance.

The re­lease con­tin­ued: "Petrotrin re­mains a most im­por­tant part of the na­tion­al econ­o­my of Trinidad and To­ba­go and con­tin­ues steady im�prove­ments geared to­wards in­creas�ing our al­ready strong con­tri­bu­tion.

"Our ef­forts are to emerge from this dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od in a fun­da�men­tal­ly stronger po­si­tion. We are con­fi­dent of im­proved and sus­tained per­for­mance in the years ahead."