Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad and To­ba­go NGL Ltd (TTNGL) has post­ed an af­ter-tax prof­it of $129.5 mil­lion for the year end­ed 2019. This rep­re­sents a 48.79 per cent de­crease from the net prof­it of the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od of $252.9 mil­lion.

In the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial state­ments, the chair­man Con­rad Enill in­di­cat­ed that the share of prof­it from the com­pa­ny’s in­vest­ment in its un­der­ly­ing as­set Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Ltd (PPG­PL) was $90.3mil­lion com­pared to $242.6 mil­lion in 2018.

“Per­for­mance at PPG­PL was ad­verse­ly im­pact­ed by low­er Mont Belvieu prod­uct prices, cou­pled with low­er Nat­ur­al Gas Liq­uids (NGL) pro­duc­tion and an in­crease in feed­stock costs.”

Enill al­so re­marked that the de­cline in prices was dri­ven by the con­tin­ued sup­ply im­bal­ance of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion in North Amer­i­ca and the re­sult­ing ex­cess sup­ply of NGL sup­ply to the mar­ket.

Ac­cord­ing to the chair­man, this was com­bined with geopo­lit­i­cal fac­tors such as the trade war be­tween the Unit­ed States and Chi­na re­sult­ing in prod­uct prices be­ing 23.4 per cent low­er than in 2018.

He com­ment­ed that NGL pro­duc­tion from gas pro­cess­ing de­creased by 9.5 per cent from 2018 and was a re­sult of a com­bi­na­tion of both low­er and dri­er nat­ur­al gas vol­umes to Point Lisas.

Enill dis­closed that PPGL’s earn­ings for 2019 were al­so im­pact­ed by the recog­ni­tion of the ac­count­ing im­pact on the busi­ness of in­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Re­port­ing Stan­dards (IFRS) 9 and 16: Fi­nan­cial In­stru­ments and Leas­es re­spec­tive­ly.

“To mit­i­gate these neg­a­tive im­pacts, PPG­PL re­mained fo­cused on main­tain­ing its com­pet­i­tive­ness in its core Caribbean mar­kets, sus­tain­ing the high op­er­at­ing avail­abil­i­ty and re­li­a­bil­i­ty of its fa­cil­i­ties (greater than 99 per cent) and on pru­dent cost and cash man­age­ment.”

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Enill ex­pressed that sig­nif­i­cant strides were made in se­cur­ing new sources of rev­enue from con­den­sate pro­cess­ing and from the ac­qui­si­tion of new as­sets.

More­over, Enill ar­gued that dur­ing 2019 PPG­PL pro­gressed its prod­uct trad­ing op­er­a­tion and end­ed the year close to fi­nal­is­ing the ac­qui­si­tion of NGL as­sets based in North Amer­i­ca.

“This ac­qui­si­tion will align to PPG­PL’s in­ter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion thrust for share­hold­er val­ue cre­ation and di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion through ex­plo­ration of all rel­e­vant growth op­por­tu­ni­ties along the NGL val­ue chain.”

Ac­cord­ing to Enill, TTNGL’s man­age­ment is cur­rent­ly eval­u­at­ing the po­ten­tial im­pact of COVID-19. He re­marked that the ef­fects of the virus on the lo­cal and glob­al fi­nan­cial and eco­nom­ic mar­kets are high­ly un­cer­tain and can­not cur­rent­ly be re­li­ably pre­dict­ed.

The po­ten­tial im­pact of the dis­ease will be as­sessed and re­port­ed on in fu­ture pe­ri­ods, ac­cord­ing to Enill.