A cri­sis ap­pears to be de­vel­op­ing at the Pt Lisas in­dus­tri­al es­tate with a con­tin­ued short­age of nat­ur­al gas to the es­tate be­cause of a short­age in do­mes­tic gas pro­duc­tion. The Busi­ness Guardian has been told that the short­fall is be­tween 100 and 200 mil­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day and, with a huge bud­get deficit, the Gov­ern­ment stands to lose tens of mil­lions of dol­lars of ad­di­tion­al rev­enue be­cause of a short­age of the gas. The sit­u­a­tion has be­come so bad that the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs Kevin Ram­nar­ine con­firmed he will be in­ter­ven­ing to find a so­lu­tion to the prob­lem and will be call­ing in the pro­duc­ers led by bpTT, BGTT, EOG ad BHP Bil­li­ton.

In an in­ter­view on Mon­day, Ram­nar­ine told BG, "It is cost­ing the down­stream pro­duc­ers mil­lions. It is hurt­ing the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) and it is sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact­ing the rev­enues to the coun­try, which does not please the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance. "I am go­ing to call in the pro­duc­ers to help find a so­lu­tion to this prob­lem. It's been go­ing on for too long and we have to solve the prob­lem. I am just wait­ing for the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary to re­turn from Ghana be­fore I hold the meet­ing next week."At the heart of the prob­lem is a short­fall of pro­duc­tion by op­er­a­tors. The Busi­ness Guardian un­der­stands that while the NGC has con­tract­ed gas from sev­er­al pro­duc­ers, the gas pro­duc­ers rarely meet their oblig­a­tions to the do­mes­tic mar­ket, with the ex­cep­tion of bpTT, which, for years, has act­ed as the swing pro­duc­er.

Sources say that bpTT has in the past met all the short­fall in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, but this is no longer the case be­cause of sev­er­al fac­tors, not the least of which was an up­grade of its in­fra­struc­ture to meet new safe­ty stan­dards fol­low­ing the Gulf of Mex­i­co dis­as­ter.

En­er­gy ex­ec­u­tives re­spond:

In a re­cent e-mail re­sponse to whether the com­pa­ny was ful­fill­ing its nat­ur­al gas re­quire­ments to the do­mes­tic mar­ket, bpTT said: "For the past six months, bpTT has main­tained av­er­age pro­duc­tion with­in our ex­pec­ta­tions of the mar­ket." The state­ment added: "In the first half of 2011, bpTT in­vest­ed in safe­ty and op­er­a­tional risk ac­tiv­i­ties. These in­clud­ed sched­uled main­te­nance and work on plant in­tegri­ty. We will con­tin­ue to in­vest in safe­ty and op­er­a­tional risk ac­tiv­i­ties in the sec­ond half of the year." NGC's pres­i­dent An­drew McIn­tosh re­cent­ly told an En­er­gy Cham­ber lun­cheon that NGC was "work­ing with all the play­ers in an ef­fort to solve the prob­lem." but, to date, there has been no res­o­lu­tion. The chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cers of the down­stream pro­duc­ers met two weeks ago with NGC man­age­ment in an ef­fort to find a so­lu­tion to the prob­lem, but the Busi­ness Guardian was told there ap­pears no end in sight.

Re­cent­ly, Charles Per­cy, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Methanex Trinidad Ltd, said his com­pa­ny has been neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed, as have oth­er plants on the es­tate.

Per­cy said: "I can­not make a prod­uct if I do not have to gas to make it and this has been hap­pen­ing now for close to six months." He es­ti­mates that the re­duc­tion in pro­duc­tion is be­tween five per cent and ten per cent due to the gas short­age. Fig­ures show that for the first six months of the fis­cal year, gov­ern­ment short­fall in rev­enue from nat­ur­al gas was close to $500 mil­lion. The Gov­ern­ment's fore­cast for rev­enue for the first half of the year was $3,963,860,774.08. It has ac­tu­al­ly re­ceived rev­enues of $3,498,441,678.04.

EN­ER­GY RE­PORTER