Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Op­po­si­tion chief whip David Lee is ac­cus­ing Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley of mis­lead­ing the Sixth Sum­mit of Heads of State and Gov­ern­ment of the Gas Ex­port­ing Coun­tries Fo­rum in Do­ha, Qatar.

“(Dr Row­ley) was telling the Sixth Sum­mit of Heads of State and Gov­ern­ment of the Gas Ex­port­ing Coun­tries that af­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion, up­stream re­cov­ery is on track. Now that is the fur­thest thing from the truth in our coun­try be­cause if you read the Cen­tral Bank Eco­nom­ic Bul­letin re­port of Jan­u­ary 2022 it tells a dif­fer­ent sto­ry- that our gas pro­duc­tion has col­lapsed by 17 per cent in the third quar­ter of 2021 so our en­tire gas in­dus­try is at an all-time low,” Lee said.

“I re­al­ly don’t know (why) the Prime Min­is­ter is giv­ing the im­pres­sion to the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty in Do­ha that our gas pro­duc­tion is up and we are poised to have this great abun­dance of nat­ur­al gas,” he said.

He al­so cit­ed a re­port in yes­ter­day’s Guardian that BHP’s Ru­by field will pro­duce much less oil than orig­i­nal­ly thought, re­sult­ing in no sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in crude oil pro­duc­tion this year.

Lee al­so ques­tioned if the gov­ern­ment will be rais­ing the price of fu­el at the pumps in light of the in­creased oil prices brought on by the on­go­ing Russ­ian in­va­sion of Ukraine.

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