It was in 1973 that the world ex­pe­ri­enced the first oil-price shock. It was spurred by the Yom Kip­pur War in the Mid­dle East in which the Amer­i­cans and oth­er West­ern coun­tries sup­port­ed Is­rael in its war against Egypt and Syr­ia.

This led to crude prices qua­dru­pling to US$12 a bar­rel and an em­bar­go against ex­port from the Mid­dle East to many west­ern coun­tries.

It was around the same time, the then Amo­co, brought on its bil­lion-bar­rel Teak, Samaan, and Poui fields off Ma­yaro. The com­bi­na­tion of price and pro­duc­tion, as well as, the sec­ond price shock led to what many re­fer to the oil boom that T&T wit­nessed in the 1970s.

Dur­ing the oil boom there was sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic ex­pan­sion.

The coun­try saw the con­struc­tion of many ma­jor high­ways, the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex, the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um and many of the sec­ondary schools.

The Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate was start­ed, wa­ter and elec­tric­i­ty was ex­pand­ed, there were sig­nif­i­cant wage in­creas­es, peo­ple moved out of agri­cul­ture, and what­ev­er agri­cul­ture re­mained, such as Ca­roni 1975 Ltd, was heav­i­ly sub­sidised.

In short, mon­ey flowed like wa­ter in this coun­try, and a lot of it was nei­ther used ef­fi­cient­ly nor in­vest­ed wise­ly.

As hap­pens with all com­modi­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly oil and gas, there is the boom and bust cy­cles, and to be hon­est since the TSP dis­cov­er­ies, the coun­try has nev­er had the same ex­plo­ration suc­cess in crude oil.

What hap­pened is that Amo­co drilled look­ing for oil and in­stead found large amounts of nat­ur­al gas.

Nat­ur­al gas is dif­fer­ent to oil in terms of its de­vel­op­ment. With oil, be­cause it op­er­ates in a glob­al mar­ket in which the price of the com­mod­i­ty is known by every­one and has less ar­bi­trage, it is pos­si­ble to sim­ply pro­duce the oil and put it on a ship, sell­ing it on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket as it heads to a re­fin­ery.

With nat­ur­al gas, ini­tial­ly, you had first to de­vel­op a project. This project re­quired the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of an end user. So for Amo­co, which would then be­come bpTT, the strat­e­gy had to be if they are go­ing to pro­duce the gas, ex­plore for the gas, and bring it to mar­ket, it must mean that they can sell it.

Some may go to petro­chem­i­cals, but a lot it was de­ter­mined could be sold on a long-term con­tract as LNG.

At the time, there was a cap­tive mar­ket for LNG in the US and oth­er parts of Eu­rope. Tech­nol­o­gy and large quan­ti­ties of rel­a­tive­ly cheap nat­ur­al gas sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tributed to what would be a project of projects.

That is what Train 1 was to this coun­try. Make no bones about it!

As a spe­cialised en­er­gy jour­nal­ist, I cov­ered the At­lantic LNG Train 1 sto­ry up close. I was in­vit­ed to tour the plant dur­ing its con­struc­tion and was at the of­fi­cial open­ing.

At­lantic made ma­jor changes to things we take for grant­ed, like the lev­el of con­struc­tion safe­ty on large projects, drug test­ing, and re­quire­ments for har­ness­es, hard hats and boots.

It saw a con­sor­tium of gas pro­duc­ers, LNG ship own­ers, those who owned the re­gasi­fi­ca­tion fa­cil­i­ties, share­hold­ers in pow­er gen­er­a­tion, and of course, the traders com­ing to­geth­er.

Through the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny, the gov­ern­ment took a share in Train 1 be­cause it want­ed to have skin in the game, and At­lantic Train 1 was set up as a tolling fa­cil­i­ty, so it was paid a fee to process the gas and turn it in­to liq­uid for ex­port. It was an arrange­ment in which the re­turn would mean that NGC was un­like­ly to lose its mon­ey, but with lim­it­ed gas pro­duc­tion, with­out ships, with­out trad­ing, with­out re­gas, with­out pow­er gen­er­a­tion in­vest­ments, its reach was lim­it­ed.

Fur­ther, the NGC with no trad­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, arranged with bpTT to trade its LNG share, at least its lim­it­ed num­ber of car­goes.

A lot has changed in the en­su­ing 20 years.

LNG has be­come al­most ubiq­ui­tous, nat­ur­al gas in T&T is not as abun­dant, and cer­tain­ly not as cheap, and bpTT’s dis­cov­er­ies have be­come pro­gres­sive­ly small­er.

It is al­so clear that the 13 years of un­in­ter­rupt­ed eco­nom­ic ex­pan­sion to 2008 and the high rev­enue that the coun­try re­ceived from 2010 to 2014 was a di­rect re­sult of LNG pro­duc­tion and prices, strong oil prices and, of course, petro­chem­i­cals.

A lot of this is dri­ven by nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion.

For more than 20 years, bpTT has been the coun­try’s largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er and when bpTT is do­ing well this coun­try tends al­so to per­form well eco­nom­i­cal­ly.

It is why the rev­e­la­tion that bpTT’s pro­jec­tions are much low­er than an­tic­i­pat­ed is a ma­jor wor­ry for the econ­o­my.

Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly that bpTT told the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion that go­ing for­ward, it should ex­pect much low­er than fore­cast­ed nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, with the short­fall be­ing as high as 15 per cent this year and over ten per cent un­til 2024.

In a con­fi­den­tial se­ries of doc­u­ments bpTT al­so told the ad­min­is­tra­tion that it has sus­tained sig­nif­i­cant loss­es over the last five years, in­clud­ing a whop­ping $2.825 bil­lion be­fore tax last year.

The doc­u­ments show that even with the an­nounced projects like Mat­a­pal and Cas­sia C, while they will in­crease pro­duc­tion by about 140 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scf/d) of gas, this will still fall short by an av­er­age of over 200 mm­scf/d.

To put it in­to con­text, that is enough gas to run two methanol plants and more than 60 per cent of all the gas the coun­try needs for elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion.

The news could not come at a worst time for the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion, al­ready faced with the em­bar­rass­ment of spend­ing a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars in a des­per­ate at­tempt to save At­lantic LNG’s Train 1, which is now like­ly to be moth­balled. Sources said yes­ter­day that En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young would soon make an an­nounce­ment on Train 1.

Guardian Me­dia has re­port­ed that Young asked the share­hold­ers to give him time to take the mat­ter to the Cab­i­net and put in place a pub­lic re­la­tions plan around the an­nounce­ment, which will in­clude the soon to be re­leased im­proved fi­nan­cial per­for­mance of the NGC.

BpTT sub­se­quent­ly sent out a press re­lease in­sist­ing that the pro­jec­tions were like­ly to change but did not pro­vide a shred of ev­i­dence of how or why, pre­fer­ring in­stead to re­ly on spin rather than al­low­ing for the trans­paren­cy re­quired for cit­i­zens, not gov­ern­ment, the cit­i­zens who are the own­ers of the oil and gas to know what is the re­al sit­u­a­tion the coun­try faces.

Rather than own its pro­jec­tions, the multi­na­tion­al tries to con­fuse the coun­try by say­ing the pro­jec­tions it pre­sent­ed to the gov­ern­ment days be­fore are like­ly an in­ac­cu­rate pic­ture.

That be­ing said the project paints a pic­ture of the largest multi­na­tion­al ac­cept­ing that un­less things, they do not at the mo­ment fore­see, change, it is like­ly that the coun­try has to find the gas from else­where.

This must mean the need to en­cour­age more ex­plo­ration, gov­ern­ment has to relook its fis­cal regime, and we must know what is the plan for nat­ur­al gas go­ing for­ward.

Hid­ing the gas strate­gies rec­om­men­da­tions is not the way the coun­try will grap­ple with its chal­lenges.

Gov­ern­ment must be re­spect­ful of the pop­u­la­tion’s right to know.

On an­oth­er note, the NGC and Methanol Hold­ings must be con­grat­u­lat­ed on reach­ing a gas sales agree­ment that will bring sta­bil­i­ty to T&T’s methanol pro­duc­tion go­ing for­ward.