Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry in Tues­day’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in the Unit­ed States may turn out to be very bad news for the Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go. In all like­li­hood, no coun­try in the 15-mem­ber Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) has as much to lose from the re-elec­tion of Mr Trump as T&T does.

The equa­tion is sim­ple: T&T ben­e­fit­ted great­ly from the re­la­tion­ship that Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley and Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young worked hard to de­vel­op with the Biden/Har­ris ad­min­is­tra­tion. That re­la­tion­ship, which in­clud­ed meet­ings with Vice Pres­i­dent Ka­mala Har­ris, re­sult­ed in T&T re­ceiv­ing a carve-out of sanc­tions im­posed on Venezuela by the Of­fice of For­eign As­set Con­trol (OFAC) in Jan­u­ary 2023. As a re­sult of the OFAC carve-out, this coun­try re­ceived a li­cence from the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion to de­vel­op the Drag­on gas field lo­cat­ed off the north-west coast of Trinidad in Venezuela’s ter­ri­to­r­i­al wa­ters.

In Oc­to­ber 2023, the US Gov­ern­ment grant­ed an amend­ment to the orig­i­nal OFAC li­cence, which al­lowed pay­ments in hard cur­ren­cy or kind to Venezuela for any nat­ur­al gas pro­duced from the Drag­on field.

That amend­ment cleared the way for the gov­ern­ments of T&T and Venezuela to sign a 30-year li­cence that al­lows whol­ly state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T and multi­na­tion­al en­er­gy gi­ant Roy­al Dutch Shell to joint­ly pro­duce and ex­port off­shore nat­ur­al gas from the Drag­on gas field.

In May 2024, T&T re­ceived an­oth­er OFAC carve-out, which al­lows NGC and bpTT to de­vel­op the Man­akin-Cocuina field, which strad­dles the mar­itime bor­der be­tween T&T and Venezuela.

As a re­sult of these re­la­tion­ships with the Biden/Har­ris ad­min­is­tra­tion, the gov­ern­ment in Port-of-Spain is pin­ning its hopes on a re­cov­ery in the pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al gas by 2027, which is ex­pect­ed to boost the out­put of LNG and petro­chem­i­cals from Point Fortin and Point Lisas. More forex is ex­pect­ed, as a re­sult.

The elec­tion of Don­ald Trump as the 47th pres­i­dent of the US may put paid to the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s hopes of a re­cov­ery of T&T’s nat­ur­al gas sec­tor in three years. That is be­cause Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro is one of the few world lead­ers to have de­fied Pres­i­dent Trump in his first term as the Amer­i­can leader.

In Au­gust 2017, the ad­min­is­tra­tion of Don­ald Trump im­posed sanc­tions which pro­hib­it­ed Venezuela’s ac­cess to US fi­nan­cial mar­kets.

In May 2018, it ex­pand­ed the sanc­tions to block US cit­i­zens from pur­chas­ing Venezue­lan debt.

In Jan­u­ary 2019, near­ly two weeks af­ter Pres­i­dent Maduro was in­au­gu­rat­ed for a sec­ond term and fol­low­ing elec­tions that many claim were il­le­git­i­mate, Mr Trump recog­nised Venezue­lan op­po­si­tion leader Juan Guai­do as the le­git­i­mate pres­i­dent of Venezuela.

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion then launched a year-long cam­paign to un­seat Mr Maduro, which in­clud­ed yet more sanc­tions that were ap­plied against Venezue­lan in­di­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies in­volved in the pe­tro­le­um, gold, min­ing, and bank­ing in­dus­tries. Yet de­spite these ef­forts by Mr Trump to re­move him, Pres­i­dent Maduro re­mains safe­ly en­sconced in the lux­u­ries of Mi­raflo­res Palace, hav­ing sur­vived the out­rage of the Venezue­lan op­po­si­tion to what they ar­gue was an­oth­er il­le­git­i­mate pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in Ju­ly.

Will Pres­i­dent Trump main­tain the close re­la­tion­ship that the out­go­ing US ad­min­is­tra­tion had with T&T for the de­vel­op­ment of Venezuela’s nat­ur­al gas re­sources? That is pos­si­ble but not like­ly, giv­en the al­most un­fet­tered pow­er that Mr Trump is like­ly to have in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

Giv­en the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a venge­ful Mr Trump can sim­ply sign an ex­ec­u­tive or­der can­celling all of the OFAC ac­com­mo­da­tions grant­ed to T&T, it be­hoves the ad­min­is­tra­tion here to con­sid­er the Plan B even­tu­al­i­ty of hav­ing to run T&T with­out Venezue­lan nat­ur­al gas in 2027.