Gov­ern­ment says this coun­try stands to ben­e­fit from an en­hanced rev­enue pack­age for the sale of LNG fol­low­ing the sign­ing of a new en­er­gy agree­ment be­tween T&T and Shell at the en­er­gy com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters in The Hague, Nether­lands on Wednesday.

Guardian Me­dia has been re­port­ing ex­clu­sive­ly that this deal in­volved the ex­ten­sion of the pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tract for blocks 6d and 6e and in­volves a mar­ket­ing and de­vel­op­ment plan for blocks 5c and 5d, the two blocks Shell is ex­pect­ed to de­vel­op to meet some of the short­fall from BPTT’s in­fill drilling pro­gramme. This will add an­oth­er 300mm­scf-d of gas per day in­to the sys­tem.

Shell is the sin­gle largest share­hold­er in At­lantic with a 51 per cent share­hold­ing.

The agree­ment comes af­ter Gov­ern­ment com­plained bit­ter­ly about the coun­try not get­ting its fair share of rev­enue, due to trans­fer pric­ing, in which one en­ti­ty sells LNG to an­oth­er en­ti­ty and where the prof­its are made by an­oth­er part of the same group, but which does not re­flect in tax­es in T&T.

The sign­ing of the agree­ment on Wednes­day was wit­nessed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Ben van Beur­den, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of Roy­al Dutch Shell. The agree­ment has been de­scribed as a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone for the peo­ple of T&T.

A press re­lease from the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter said the en­er­gy deal was the re­sult of months of pos­i­tive and re­la­tion­ship-build­ing dis­cus­sions be­tween Shell and Gov­ern­ment. The agree­ment re­flects the “mu­tu­al im­por­tance of the re­la­tion­ship and the val­ue Shell has placed on Trinidad and To­ba­go as a province.”

The par­ties have al­so com­mit­ted to con­tin­u­ing their dis­cus­sions on the de­vel­op­ment of the en­er­gy sec­tor in T&T.

The agree­ment was signed by En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan on be­half of the gov­ern­ment, while Derek Hud­son, Vice Pres­i­dent and Coun­try Chair­man of Shell T&T, signed on be­half of Shell.

Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime min­is­ter, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, who is al­so in the Nether­lands as part of the T&T del­e­ga­tion, and De La Rey Ven­ter, Ex­ec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of Shell’s In­te­grat­ed Gas Ven­ture Busi­ness, signed as wit­ness­es.

Pri­or to the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny, PM Row­ley met with Maarten Wet­se­laar, the In­te­grat­ed Gas and New En­er­gies Di­rec­tor at Shell.

Wet­se­laar is re­spon­si­ble for Shell’s in­te­grat­ed gas busi­ness, in­clud­ing the in­dus­try-lead­ing liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas and gas-to-liq­uids po­si­tions. He al­so leads the new en­er­gies busi­ness, in­clud­ing Shell’s in­vest­ment in new fu­els, new en­er­gy car­ri­ers and new busi­ness mod­els for a low-car­bon fu­ture.

Dr Row­ley and the T&T del­e­ga­tion were due to vis­it the Shell Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­tre in Am­s­ter­dam where they were ex­pect­ed to tour the fa­cil­i­ty and re­ceive an up­date on the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy be­ing de­vel­oped and de­ployed across Shell and specif­i­cal­ly in T&T to lever­age im­proved re­turns in the en­er­gy sec­tor.