De­spite the chal­lenges in the en­er­gy sec­tor due to COVID-19, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan says the sec­tor is not dead in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Speak­ing at the launch of the Petrotrin land dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­gramme at the Pa­lo Seco Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School yes­ter­day, Khan lashed out at Op­po­si­tion leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and oth­er crit­ics who sug­gest­ed this.

“When the leader of the Op­po­si­tion states that the en­er­gy sec­tor is dead, she is dead to the truth. The en­er­gy sec­tor, de­spite the chal­lenges, is alive and kick­ing,” he said.

“We are not bury­ing our heads in the sand. We face se­ri­ous chal­lenges. It baf­fles me be­fore I go to sleep in the night to un­der­stand how can we keep the in­vest­ments lev­el so high. I thank God for it and our gas pro­duc­tion pro­file, while it is still not where we want it, it is not dis­as­trous and we will hang in there and we will ride through this pe­ri­od of low com­mod­i­ty prices and when we build the fu­ture and when we build the econ­o­my of the en­er­gy sec­tor in 22, 23, 24 and to 25, I think Trinidad will be in a good place.”

He said the im­pact of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic on do­mes­tic up­stream com­pa­nies has been min­i­mal as com­pa­nies con­tin­ue to op­er­ate.

“The ma­jor­i­ty of de­vel­op­ment and ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ties are on stream and any de­fer­ral is for a short time frame. As a con­se­quence, oil and gas pro­duc­tion has been main­tained at rel­a­tive­ly pre-COVID-19 lev­els,” Khan said.

“Gas pro­duc­tion is cur­rent­ly at 3.5 bcf per day and oil pro­duc­tion is av­er­ag­ing 57,000 bar­rels of oil per day. As a mat­ter of fact, in April this year oil pro­duc­tion reached 60,000 bar­rels per day for the first time in 18 months.”

How­ev­er, Khan said at the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor, am­mo­nia and methanol were at their low­est lev­el in years, av­er­ag­ing be­tween US$200 and 250 per met­ric tonne.

“Due to the sur­plus glob­al ca­pac­i­ty and the im­pact of COVID there is sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in the in­dus­tri­al de­mand for am­mo­nia and methanol, lead­ing to very de­pressed prices. So we have tem­porar­i­ly shut-in cer­tain plants in Point Lisas, not be­cause we did any­thing wrong you know, it is be­cause the glob­al de­mand is so low that prices have reached rock bot­tom and prices are now be­low your cost of pro­duc­tion.”

He said these plants will be do­ing main­te­nance over the next three months and have al­so re­tained their staff.

Khan not­ed that T&T is the on­ly coun­try where Shell and BP have main­tained their in­vest­ment lev­els. With the gen­er­al elec­tion less than a month away, Khan al­so warned the pop­u­la­tion to be wary of fake news and ru­mours.

Giv­ing an ex­am­ple this, he said he was con­tact­ed by a re­porter re­gard­ing a fake doc­u­ment that claimed Her­itage sold 830,000 bar­rels of crude which left on a Venezue­lan ves­sel. He said the doc­u­ment had a Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um stamp and sig­na­ture and a CARI­COM stamp.

“I got scared when I saw it,” he said, adding, “that is the length that cer­tain op­er­a­tives will go to dis­cred­it T&T, try­ing to en­cour­age sanc­tions by the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca.”

He said they have al­so seen pos­i­tive out­comes with the re­struc­tur­ing of Petrotrin.