Cur­tis Williams

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

BPTT has not had any dis­rup­tion to its sup­ply of nat­ur­al gas even though it has been forced to make changes to its op­er­a­tions ac­cord­ing to its Re­gion­al Pres­i­dent, Claire Fitz­patrick.

Speak­ing re­cent­ly on CNC3 The En­er­gy Sec­tor, Nav­i­gat­ing the Cri­sis, Fitz­patrick said to date there has not been any dis­rup­tion, even though she con­cedes as time pass­es it will be come more dif­fi­cult.

“In the month of March we have had no sup­ply dis­rup­tions and I am hop­ing ob­vi­ous­ly that it will con­tin­ue, but it gets in­creas­ing­ly chal­leng­ing as we go on, to main­tain the ac­tiv­i­ty lev­els that we need to do, but its our jobs to work out what we need to do to en­sure that hap­pens. Specif­i­cal­ly we have been look­ing at what is the min­i­mum we need to en­sure con­ti­nu­ity across our op­er­a­tions.” BPTT’s Re­gion­al Pres­i­dent re­vealed.

The com­pa­ny pro­duces more than half of the coun­try’s to­tal sup­ply of nat­ur­al gas and is a ma­jor share­hold­er in At­lantic LNG.

Fitz­patrick said BPTT’s pri­ma­ry ob­jec­tive has been en­sur­ing the health and safe­ty of its em­ploy­ees and the safe op­er­a­tions of its busi­ness in T&T.

She said BPTT start­ed its re­sponse plan­ning months ago and it has made changes as time has gone along.

“We ac­tu­al­ly start­ed our re­sponse plan­ning in Jan­u­ary as we start­ed to see things de­vel­op­ing...We ac­tu­al­ly stood up our cri­sis re­sponse on the 14th of March and co­in­cid­ing with that was our de­ci­sion to move to work from home for those non es­sen­tial mem­bers of our team while al­so build­ing out a plan to min­imise the ex­po­sure for those who are in fact trav­el­ling to site and who are in fact do­ing very vi­tal work in help­ing us to en­sure we are keep­ing the gas sup­ply to the coun­try.”

Fitz­patrick said BPTT had al­so tak­en steps to re­duce num­ber of in­ter­faces that oc­cur among mem­bers of its staff and made ad­just­ments to its trans­fers in­clud­ing hav­ing dif­fer­ent shift ro­ta­tions.

The com­pa­ny was one of the first to an­nounce work from home and this was ex­pect­ed to end to­mor­row but has now been ex­tend­ed for an­oth­er month.

This means its of­fices around Queens Park Sa­van­nah and at Ga­le­o­ta Point re­main closed.

She ex­plained: “Orig­i­nal­ly we had closed the of­fices from the 16th of March to the 15th of April. That has sub­se­quent­ly been ex­tend­ed to the 15th of May. Now the Trinida­di­an gov­ern­ment, they have ex­tend­ed their es­sen­tial work­er on­ly, through to the end of April, we wait and see what the gov­ern­ment does be­yond that. We will not look to do any­thing less than the gov­ern­ment and we may stick with the glob­al po­si­tion of BP, par­tic­u­lar­ly if that sup­ports the ob­jec­tive the gov­ern­ment has.”