While the en­er­gy sec­tor was boost­ed by high com­mod­i­ty prices in 2022, there con­tin­ued to be grow­ing con­cerns that de­clin­ing pro­duc­tion and sup­ply of nat­ur­al gas would not al­low T&T to max­imise the favourable con­di­tions.

This is­sue lin­gered for much of 2023, as the Gov­ern­ment had to be search­ing for av­enues to bol­ster the nat­ur­al gas sup­ply.

A po­ten­tial long-term an­swer to the sup­ply is­sues emerged when Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley called a press con­fer­ence on Jan­u­ary 24.

On that day he re­vealed: “The US Gov­ern­ment has to­day ap­proved Trinidad and To­ba­go’s de­vel­op­ment of the Drag­on field via an OFAC (Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol) waiv­er from sanc­tions with spe­cif­ic terms to be fi­nalised.

“What this means is that the re­stric­tions on the Drag­on gas field de­vel­op­ment are now re­lieved and all rel­e­vant par­ties can progress the plans to re­sult in nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela even­tu­al­ly flow­ing from these proven re­serves to Trinidad and To­ba­go then on­to Caribbean, Eu­ro­pean and oth­er mar­kets, bring­ing much hu­man­i­tar­i­an ben­e­fits to the Venezue­lan pop­u­la­tion and greater en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty to the Caribbean re­gion.”

How­ev­er, the waiv­er made it ex­plic­it­ly clear, that T&T could not di­rect­ly pay Venezuela.

For much of the year, de­spite reg­u­lar ne­go­ti­a­tions with both the US and the South Amer­i­can state, the is­sue of pay­ment be­came a point of con­tention, par­tic­u­lar­ly for Venezuela.

In Ju­ly, when asked about the sta­tus of the Drag­on Gas deal and the OFAC, the Prime Min­is­ter stat­ed, “The Venezue­lans have not ac­cept­ed the terms laid down by the Amer­i­cans. That is the long and short of it.”

He con­tin­ued: “We fought very hard to get the Amer­i­cans to give us a carve-out which is to al­low us to treat with PDVSA (the Venezue­lan state en­er­gy com­pa­ny) with­out break­ing the sanc­tions. We even­tu­al­ly won that bat­tle but they put a con­di­tion on it which the Venezue­lans as of now have not ac­cept­ed. We’re still talk­ing on both sides; we’re still ne­go­ti­at­ing.”

The con­tin­ued talks would even­tu­al­ly see the gov­ern­ment sign­ing a prof­it-shar­ing agree­ment with Venezuela in Sep­tem­ber, which sig­nalled some progress but still no green light for mo­bil­i­sa­tion in the field.

How­ev­er the break­through would come through dis­cus­sions with the Unit­ed States, as af­ter the En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young’s sev­enth vis­it to Wash­ing­ton DC, he would call a press con­fer­ence of his own on Oc­to­ber 17, 2023 to dis­cuss en­er­gy-re­lat­ed mat­ters.

At that press con­fer­ence, Young re­vealed that some key changes had been made to the OFAC waiv­er.

“I am pleased to an­nounce that to­day, that the US gov­ern­ment has is­sued, through the trea­sury de­part­ment OFAC, to the Gov­ern­ment of T&T, an amend­ment to the li­cence that we had re­quest­ed in the terms that we have re­quest­ed,” Young said then, “The li­cence will now run for two years un­til Oc­to­ber 31, 2025, which is more than enough time for us to get done what needs to get done.”

But more im­por­tant­ly, Young con­firmed that Trinidad and To­ba­go could pay Venezuela in cash or var­i­ous oth­er meth­ods.

“It al­so al­lows T&T, work­ing along with NGC and Shell, to ne­go­ti­ate, and com­plete ne­go­ti­a­tions and all agree­ments with the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment and PDVSA for the de­vel­op­ment, pro­duc­tion and ex­port of that gas from the Drag­on gas field in T&T for us to de­vel­op it, and for us to make pay­ments in fi­at cur­ren­cy, as well as US dol­lars, as well as Bo­li­vars, as well as via hu­man­i­tar­i­an mea­sures, which is what was en­vis­aged ini­tial­ly,” he said.

Fol­low­ing this, Young re­turned to Venezuela to ne­go­ti­ate fur­ther and to date the Gov­ern­ment has dis­closed progress, yet it has con­tin­u­ous­ly stat­ed the non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment pre­vents them from dis­clos­ing the de­tails dis­cussed with the South Amer­i­can state in pub­lic.

How­ev­er, there have been hints that the thaw­ing of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween Venezuela and the US was be­gin­ning to have a pos­i­tive im­pact on the pos­si­ble ex­ploita­tion of cross-bor­der and near-bor­der nat­ur­al gas fields..

In No­vem­ber, Amer­i­can en­gi­neer­ing com­pa­ny Mc­Der­mott con­firmed it had re­ceived a lim­it­ed no­tice to pro­ceed for an En­gi­neer­ing, Pro­cure­ment, Con­struc­tion and In­stal­la­tion (EP­CI) con­tract from Shell T&T for the Man­a­tee gas field de­vel­op­ment project, lo­cat­ed off the east coast of T&T.

Sub­ject to Shell tak­ing a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion, the Man­a­tee project scope is for the de­sign, pro­cure­ment, fab­ri­ca­tion, trans­porta­tion, in­stal­la­tion, and com­mis­sion­ing of a well­head plat­form, off­shore and on­shore gas pipelines.

The Man­a­tee field forms a part of the Lo­ran-Man­a­tee field, which strad­dles the mar­itime bor­der be­tween T&T and Venezuela, with Lo­ran be­ing lo­cat­ed in the ma­rine area of Venezuela. The Lo­ran-Man­a­tee reser­voir has an es­ti­mat­ed re­source of 10.04 tcf, of which 2.712 tcf is with­in the Man­a­tee field.

But de­spite the ad­vance­ment of talks in that re­gard, the is­sue of gas sup­ply re­mained an on­go­ing is­sue as by Ju­ly, the im­pact of sup­ply short­ages has al­ready be­gan to tell.

Sev­er­al plants in Point Lisas were shut down in Ju­ly due nat­ur­al gas sup­ply short­ages.

The En­er­gy Min­istry con­firmed that one of the coun­try’s ma­jor up­stream nat­ur­al gas sup­pli­ers had to shut in its gas pro­duc­tion to deal with an un­planned tech­ni­cal is­sue.

Wood­side would come for­ward con­firm­ing it had to shut down off­shore op­er­a­tions in the coun­try as a safe­ty pre­cau­tion, lead­ing to sev­er­al plants putting a pause on op­er­a­tions or opt­ing to un­der­go main­te­nance in the down pe­ri­od.

How­ev­er, some bet­ter news would come at the tail end of the year as a share­hold­ers’ agree­ment for the re­struc­tur­ing of At­lantic was fi­nalised in Lon­don with Shell, BP and whol­ly state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T (NGC) sign­ing an agree­ment with Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young in at­ten­dance.

This new agree­ment in­clud­ed a deal to in­crease the stake and po­ten­tial rev­enues avail­able to the NGC, which En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said would pave the way for greater rev­enues for the state.

While for­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine ac­knowl­edged the deal had some ben­e­fit with the in­creased rev­enue, he ques­tioned what would be done to im­prove pro­duc­tion lev­els.

“The first thing is that the pro­duc­tion of LNG is 38 per cent less than it was in 2015.

“And that’s be­cause nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion is in pre­cip­i­tous de­cline.

“The oth­er thing is that we need to find a way to ques­tion when this new share­hold­er agree­ment will be ef­fec­tive,” said Ram­nar­ine.

“The more press­ing is­sue for T&T is the pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al gas, which as I said, is not head­ed in the right di­rec­tion.

“It cer­tain­ly has not been for a while. And that, to me is the greater con­cern be­cause LNG plants don’t run on share­hold­ers agree­ments, and they don’t run ole talk. They run on nat­ur­al gas.”

Oth­er en­er­gy in­sid­ers raised sim­i­lar con­cerns, as they not­ed while there was much made of the Drag­on gas sit­u­a­tion, that would not yield re­turns un­til po­ten­tial­ly 2027/2028.

In­stead, they hoped more fo­cus would be placed on im­prov­ing the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion.

There was some pos­i­tive news in that re­gard as Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration an­nounced that the Cas­cadu­ra nat­ur­al gas and liq­uids fa­cil­i­ty has safe­ly de­liv­ered first pro­duc­tion in Sep­tem­ber.

The hope is that there will be more an­nounce­ments like this in 2024.