GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Co-founder and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of De­N­o­vo En­er­gy Ltd, Bryan Ram­sumair, says it is im­por­tant that the prop­er leg­is­la­tion be put in place to help this coun­try’s en­er­gy sec­tor move for­ward.

Ram­sumair made the com­ments to Guardian Me­dia Ltd fol­low­ing as­sur­ances made by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley that T&T still re­mains a very vi­able en­er­gy econ­o­my with a bright fu­ture.

How­ev­er, Ram­sumair said part of this is en­sur­ing there are prop­er tools in place.

“In­vestors will come to Trinidad but we need to demon­strate that we have the right leg­isla­tive frame­work ... we need to have en­abling leg­is­la­tion to be able to say look, ‘We are pro­mot­ing green hy­dro­gen, we are pro­mot­ing car­bon se­ques­tra­tion and leg­is­la­tion needs to ex­ist around that,” he ex­plained, adding that there al­so needs to be the right phys­i­cal in­cen­tives as to at­tract in­vestors.

Dur­ing a town hall-style in­ter­view with En­er­gy Cham­ber CEO, Dax Dri­ver, on the open­ing day of the 2024 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, the Prime Min­is­ter as­sured that mea­sures con­tin­ue to be put in place to en­sure that ac­tion is ac­cel­er­at­ed to push T&T’s en­er­gy fu­ture.

On how con­fi­dent he is on this, Ram­sumair citied the ini­tia­tives re­gard­ing Venezuela as well de­vel­op­ments re­gard­ing deep­wa­ter, stat­ing that the “mo­men­tum was be­gin­ning to build.

“And I hope that is a tip­ping point for new and ad­di­tion­al things to come down the pipeline and cer­tain­ly we are en­cour­aged by this to see that hap­pen.”

De­N­o­vo En­er­gy is ma­jor­i­ty owned by Pro­man, the Switzer­land-head­quar­tered en­er­gy gi­ant, and cur­rent­ly pro­duces nat­ur­al gas from the Igua­na and Zan­dolie fields in the Gulf of Paria, off­shore Trinidad.

Mean­while, Paul Baay, pres­i­dent and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration agreed that more time­ly ac­tion is need­ed in the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor, not­ing that get­ting pa­per work done on time was one such mea­sure.

Ac­cord­ing to Baay, when things are de­layed, this makes process­es frus­trat­ing.

“I think he (Row­ley) had a more prac­ti­cal ap­proach in how we take the in­dus­try for­ward. There is short term and long term and I think he was re­al­is­tic about those dif­fer­ent things. So I was hap­py about those things, but I would like to see more ac­tiv­i­ty and more time­ly ac­tiv­i­ty on things like the li­cences, the on­shore bid round that we were suc­cess­ful at and putting in place some of the pa­per­work so we can get in­to the field. But over­all it’s pret­ty clear he (Row­ley) un­der­stands some of the short term and long term chal­lenges and the col­lab­o­ra­tion idea is great, but for us we al­so need to get things done,” Baay ex­plained.

He, how­ev­er, said Touch­stone will re­main in T&T for the long haul.

“We think we have com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage here be­cause we have been here and we have a very big land base and we un­der­stand the sys­tem. Right now 100 per cent of our fo­cus is in Trinidad and I don’t see that chang­ing,” Baay said.

Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration is a Cana­di­an-owned oil com­pa­ny, whose fo­cus is in de­vel­op­ing oil and nat­ur­al blocks on­shore in south Trinidad.