A lot of steam was gen­er­at­ed a cou­ple of weeks ago by the An­tho­ny Wil­son ar­ti­cle about T&T send­ing LNG to Ja­maica to pow­er their cal­cin­ing process that pro­duces alu­mi­na from baux­ite.

Wil­son had point­ed out that these Ja­maican in­dus­tries are al­most to­tal­ly owned by in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors in­clud­ing a Russ­ian oli­garch. In oth­er words Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning has put on record that he con­sid­ers it a "na­tion­al pri­or­i­ty" for us to sup­ply our valu­able LNG to feed the for­tunes of these for­eign "en­tre­pre­neurs."

Sev­er­al let­ters hit the pa­pers all cry­ing foul. I did not see in any of these let­ters where this LNG would come from, con­sid­er­ing our fast de­plet­ing re­serves. Man­ning hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly ad­vised Ja­maica that we sim­ply do not have the re­serves avail­able to sup­ply them has now made an about face and now in­tends to sup­ply.

Please note that in the per­haps one or two years that have elapsed since any­body pub­lished a Ry­der-Scott re­port on our re­serves (that showed we do not have enough) vir­tu­al­ly no ex­plo­ration has been done, cer­tain­ly no gas finds have been an­nounced and re­serves can on­ly have de­creased. Al­so note that the Gov­ern­ment promis­es to re­vise fis­cal terms on new acreage have come to naught. No re­vised terms have been an­nounced. In fact, by this in­ac­tion we have pushed back the whole is­sue of new leas­ing and ex­plo­ration a fur­ther two years while re­serves con­tin­ue to de­plete. Do not be di­vert­ed by the re­cent an­nounce­ments about Cen­tri­ca and Voy­ager. These were ap­proved years ago and are un­like­ly to re­sult in sig­nif­i­cant re­serves.

Al­so the re­cent let­ters did not ad­dress the alu­mini­um smelter it­self. As far as can be de­ter­mined from pub­li­ca­tions this con­tro­ver­sial smelter is to be built on a sub-eco­nom­ic scale and ded­i­cate a minis­cule part of its pro­duc­tion to in­dus­tries in Trinidad. It was pre­vi­ous­ly an­nounced that the Venezue­lan part­ner had pulled out which should mean that T&T has raised its stake in this plant from 60 per cent to 100 per cent. So here we are hurtling head­long in­to an­oth­er un­eco­nom­ic dan­ger­ous ven­ture, with in­struc­tions in Chi­nese,�re­quir­ing an enor­mous elec­tri­cal gen­er­a­tion plant fu­elled with�gas we don't have, now promis­ing to send more of this myth­i­cal gas to Ja­maica in or­der to ob­tain as­sured sup­plies of alu­mi­na that we could eas­i­ly buy else­where, in or­der to get a few tonnes/year of alu­mini­um that we could buy on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket.

In the process we have de­stroyed 1000 acres of for­est, con­front­ed res­i­dents and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists, the EMA has come in­to dis­re­pute in the courts for ap­prov­ing it at all, and Man­ning par­tic­u­lar­ly, has lost a lot of pop­u­lar­i­ty by his re­fusal to lis­ten to any­body. Could we please have full dis­clo­sure and eco­nom­ic jus­ti­fi­ca­tion on all as­pects of this project?

Reg Pot­ter

Glen­coe