PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

While many of the re­cent head­lines sur­round­ing the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor have been fo­cussed on pos­si­ble re­turns from Venezue­lan near-bor­der or cross-bor­der nat­ur­al gas fields, En­er­gy Cham­ber CEO Dr Thack­wray 'Dax' Dri­ver says the im­me­di­ate fo­cus should be on pro­duc­tion from fields in Trinidad and To­ba­go wa­ters.

"There's a lot go­ing on in­side Trinidad, in our ter­ri­to­r­i­al wa­ters, to in­crease gas pro­duc­tion from with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go. And the fo­cus of our rec­om­men­da­tions to the Gov­ern­ment for this na­tion­al bud­get are fo­cused on that. About get­ting the in­vest­ment in­to up­stream pro­duc­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go, there are some ma­jor projects which are in the off­ing, be­ing de­vel­oped. The Man­a­tee field is the big one, which Shell has tak­en an in­vest­ment de­ci­sion that is go­ing to help in­crease Trinidad and To­ba­go nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion in two years time." said Dri­ver on the Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme on CNC3 on Wednes­day.

He said push­ing pro­duc­tion from these fields was cru­cial, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it typ­i­cal­ly takes years for re­turns to be seen from lo­cal fields.

"It doesn't hap­pen straight away. It takes a while to these mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar US dol­lar in­vest­ments. And they take a while to im­ple­ment. So we are see­ing the things which should lead to in­creased nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go in the next cou­ple of years, Dri­ver said.

He point­ed to one very large po­ten­tial project with­in T&T's deep­wa­ter, the Ca­lyp­so project, and that is be­ing worked through be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the in­vestors. Dri­ver ex­pressed hope that there would be an in­vest­ment de­ci­sion soon for the Ca­lyp­so field as well.

He al­so ex­plained that while there could be some lev­el of geopo­lit­i­cal im­pact as a re­sult of the up­com­ing US elec­tions, he did not ex­pect the fall­out from the re­cent Venezue­lan pres­i­den­tial elec­tions to af­fect this coun­try's nat­ur­al gas deals with the South Amer­i­can state.

"I don't want to re­al­ly spec­u­late how a change in ad­min­is­tra­tion in the US would im­pact that. It's very dif­fi­cult to know. There's so many fac­tors which will go in­to mak­ing de­ci­sions around that. What I would say is that from the point of view of Venezuela, who­ev­er is in pow­er in Venezuela, that the ex­port of nat­ur­al gas to Trinidad just makes very good eco­nom­ic sense to them. So I think that the eco­nom­ic dri­ve to ex­port nat­ur­al gas to Trinidad will ex­ist who­ev­er is in pow­er in Venezuela,' he said, adding that cur­rent­ly T&T would ben­e­fit from the fact the Eu­ro­pean Union is cur­rent­ly seek­ing al­ter­na­tive nat­ur­al gas sup­plies as a re­sult of the Rus­sia/Ukraine war.

"I think that it is im­por­tant just to note that the world, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Eu­ro­pean Union, is look­ing to im­port nat­ur­al gas from se­cure sup­pli­ers. And Trinidad and To­ba­go is ranked as one of the very se­cure sup­pli­ers of nat­ur­al gas to mar­kets like the EU. So that gives us the abil­i­ty to mon­e­tise that nat­ur­al gas to sell to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets," said the En­er­gy Cham­ber CEO.

He al­so stressed that the coun­try should place some em­pha­sis on re­turns from its oil pro­duc­tion, as he said the win­dow for that was shrink­ing as elec­tron­ic ve­hi­cles grow in pop­u­lar­i­ty glob­al­ly.