Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Point a Pierre, David Lee has ex­pressed con­cern with BP’s paus­ing of talks with Venezuela on the de­vel­op­ment of the Man­akin-Cocuina field.

In a me­dia re­lease MP Lee said, “Yet again an­oth­er one of Min­is­ter Young’s promis­es of fu­ture gas for Trinidad and To­ba­go is on a Red light!”

The Op­po­si­tion Shad­ow En­er­gy Min­is­ter said

BP’s de­ci­sion to pause talks with Venezuela on the de­vel­op­ment of the Man­akin-Cocuina field as a re­sult of the re­in­state­ment of US Sanc­tions, a mere two months af­ter dis­cus­sions be­gan, is ev­i­dence that a num­ber of this Gov­ern­ment’s gas prospect and the en­tire out­look of the en­er­gy sec­tor is based on “hopes and dreams”.

“

The Op­po­si­tion was sur­prised that BP would have start­ed “talks” with the reim­po­si­tion of USA sanc­tions loom­ing. Were they pushed in­to meet­ing with Venezuela?

On March 15th Min­is­ter Young boast­ed about this project in Par­lia­ment, stat­ing that he was hailed by glob­al Min­is­ters for this de­vel­op­ment as this was, as he stat­ed, “top of the news in the glob­al en­er­gy re­ports”He said this

gov­ern­ment’s per­sis­tent ap­proach is to pur­sue the vul­ner­a­ble, un­sta­ble path of try­ing to tap in­to Venezue­lan re­serves for gas, while ne­glect­ing the mon­e­ti­za­tion of gas with­in our own bor­ders.

“

It is be­yond rea­son and ra­tio­nale that this Gov­ern­ment would rather car­ry the oil and gas com­pa­nies to a for­eign province to ac­cess their gas as Min­is­ter Young did with this project as op­posed to plac­ing all his ef­forts here, to mon­e­tize our gas for max­i­mum ben­e­fit for the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

MP Lee said yes

we are a ma­ture province, but there is oil and gas, it just re­quires in­no­va­tion, in­cen­tivisaton, po­lit­i­cal will and work.