GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

With pre­lim­i­nary work on the Drag­on Gas project al­ready tak­ing place, Ed­mond Thomp­son, vice-pres­i­dent and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor at Nu­trien Trinidad says this will great­ly help the com­pa­ny con­tin­ue its op­er­a­tions.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian, Thomp­son, who was ap­point­ed to the role in Au­gust this year, said gas sup­ply con­tin­ues to be a chal­lenge for Nu­trien Trinidad, for­mer­ly PCS Ni­tro­gen Trinidad Ltd.

Head­quar­tered in Saskatchewan, Cana­da, Nu­trien is one of the largest man­u­fac­tur­ers of fer­tilis­ers in the world. It is the coun­try’s largest am­mo­nia pro­duc­er and at Point Lisas, it has one of the largest ni­tro­gen man­u­fac­tur­ing com­plex­es in the world.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, gas sup­plies is a chal­lenge for us. Like many of the oth­er pro­duc­ers here in Trinidad and To­ba­go, we don’t have an abun­dant sup­ply of gas, so we face cer­tain re­stric­tions in nat­ur­al gas sup­ply. We’re not able to run our fa­cil­i­ties full out. That is a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge for us.

“We man­age with­in those con­straints, but it does con­tin­ue to be a chal­lenge,” Thomp­son said, fol­low­ing a func­tion the com­pa­ny host­ed at the Hy­att Re­gency on Thurs­day night.

Pressed fur­ther as to what per­cent­age of neg­a­tive im­pact Nu­trien could pos­si­bly fac­ing due to the nat­ur­al gas short­fall, Thomp­son said that was hard to quan­ti­fy, but main­tained it was sig­nif­i­cant.

He said due to the nat­ur­al gas chal­lenges Nu­trien has not been able to op­ti­mise its pro­duc­tion process­es in T&T.

“In a large scale man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tion like ours, we wish to run our plants 24 hours a day, sev­en days a week. That’s what they’re de­signed to do. In some cas­es, we’re not able to run all our plants all the time. That im­pacts our over­all ef­fi­cien­cy. It does im­pact us in that way.

“...We have a turn­around on our Train IV am­mo­nia plants. We’re ac­tu­al­ly not run­ning that plant be­cause we’re do­ing some in­vest­ments on it. We have four am­mo­nia plants and a urea plant. We’re able to run three of the four plants com­fort­ably right now. Once we fin­ish the Train IV, we will have to make a de­ci­sion about how to com­bine which three of the four plants we will run. We on­ly have gas to run three out of the four am­mo­nia plants,” Thomp­son said.

Shar­ing some in­sights on which of the plants can pos­si­bly be com­bined, Thomp­son said, “It just de­pends on which one is avail­able at the time. Some­times, you can make a switch de­pend­ing on if you need to do some main­te­nance work on one, you can take one down and run the oth­er one.

“It’s a more dy­nam­ic de­ci­sion than just stay­ing on it.We al­ways try to run the most ef­fi­cient plants first be­cause that’s the way to re­spon­si­bly use a lim­it­ed re­source that we have in nat­ur­al gas... but if we have to take one down for some oth­er rea­son, we swap it.”

On his rec­om­men­da­tions, Thomp­son said, “Per­son­al­ly, speak­ing from where I sit, I think we’re re­al­ly sat­is­fied with the steps that are be­ing tak­en...cross-bor­der gas, those ini­tia­tives are in place and de­vel­op­ing re­al­ly well.

“We’re ex­pect­ing those to come on sched­ule. If those come on sched­ule, that will be great. There are oth­er ac­tiv­i­ties that are hap­pen­ing cur­rent­ly, where we ex­pect to have more and more sup­ply com­ing on in 2025 and be­yond. As long as those sup­plies con­tin­ue to come on and we see some eas­ing in some of the re­stric­tions, we’ll be re­al­ly hap­py. We’re just con­tin­u­ing to do what we’re do­ing. We know that they’re work­ing re­al­ly hard for it. Any­thing we can do to sup­port them, we’re hap­py to do,” said Thomp­son, a chem­i­cal en­gi­neer with a Mas­ter’s in busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The Drag­on gas project is ex­pect­ed to ex­port gas from the Drag­on field in Venezue­lan wa­ters to Shell’s Hi­bis­cus plat­form off T&T’s North Coast.

On Oc­to­ber 11, 2024 Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, along with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Shell and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny vis­it­ed the Dona Jose 2 ves­sel at Tem­blado­ra Port, Ch­aguara­mas.

The Dona Jose 2 ves­sel, char­tered by Geo­hidra, a Venezue­lan com­pa­ny con­tract­ed by Shell, will un­der­take a geo­phys­i­cal and ge­ot­ech­ni­cal sur­vey from the Drag­on field to the Shell op­er­at­ed Hi­bis­cus plat­form, to ac­quire da­ta with the ves­sel’s side scan sonar, multi­beam echo sounder and oth­er sur­vey tech­nol­o­gy on­board.

The min­istry not­ed this first phase of the project is small but crit­i­cal as it rep­re­sents the first phys­i­cal work to be done by Shell on the Drag­on field.

These sub­sea sur­veys will al­low Shell to col­lect tech­ni­cal da­ta to as­sess the sta­tus of ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture and tech­ni­cal da­ta to sup­port the de­sign of new fa­cil­i­ties to be in­stalled. The sur­veys will al­so de­ter­mine the de­sign and route for the in­stal­la­tion of a 22km pipeline from the Drag­on sub­sea field to the Shell op­er­at­ed Hi­bis­cus plat­form, pend­ing Fi­nal In­vest­ment De­ci­sion.

Look­ing ahead for 2025, Thomp­son said as a large man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty Nu­trien, its key strat­e­gy is to keep its peo­ple safe.

“So safe­ty for us at Nu­trien is a core val­ue. So every­thing we do is about keep­ing em­ploy­ees safe. We have re­al­ly a lot of, I would say, op­por­tu­ni­ty to al­ways con­tin­ue to im­prove safe­ty be­cause safe­ty is some­thing that if you ever take your eyes off it, some­body can get in­jured so you nev­er want that to hap­pen.”

Hap­py to re­turn home to build T&T

In a ca­reer span­ning over three decades with Nu­trien and its pre­de­ces­sor com­pa­nies,Thomp­son has held a va­ri­ety of roles in en­gi­neer­ing, project man­age­ment, and man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions.

Over the course of his ca­reer, he has worked in T&T, the US and Cana­da, lead­ing large-scale op­er­a­tions and cor­po­rate func­tions in all three coun­tries.

He as­sumed his cur­rent role in Au­gust of 2024, tak­ing on re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Nu­trien’s Trinidad busi­ness.

Pri­or to this, he held the role of vice-pres­i­dent, en­gi­neer­ing, tech­nol­o­gy and cap­i­tal, ni­tro­gen and phos­phate at the com­pa­ny.

In this role he was re­spon­si­ble for de­ploy­ment and gov­er­nance of tech­nol­o­gy and cap­i­tal in the ni­tro­gen and phos­phate busi­ness unit at Nu­trien, as well as over­all re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the cor­po­rate process safe­ty, en­gi­neer­ing, re­li­a­bil­i­ty, project man­age­ment, and main­te­nance pro­grams in North Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

“So it’s great to come back to a place that I’m fa­mil­iar with. I was part of the start­up of the op­er­a­tions of two of the fa­cil­i­ties. I worked on some of the ex­pan­sions of two of the oth­er fa­cil­i­ties so I’m re­al­ly fa­mil­iar with the op­er­a­tions. I’m fa­mil­iar with some of the se­nior lead­ers.

“I had a range of roles while I was abroad. I spent many years do­ing op­er­a­tions man­age­ment. Af­ter that, I had sim­i­lar roles to this where I was re­spon­si­ble for the en­tire op­er­a­tions of sev­er­al fa­cil­i­ties. One in the US in Au­gus­ta, Geor­gia and an­oth­er one in Al­ber­ta, Cana­da, in the Cal­gary area. And then just pri­or to tak­ing this role, I was the vice-pres­i­dent of en­gi­neer­ing, tech­nol­o­gy and cap­i­tal for our en­tire ni­tro­gen and phos­phate busi­ness,” Thomp­son added.

In that port­fo­lio, he had a team of about 70 pro­fes­sion­als who sup­port­ed both the cap­i­tal de­ploy­ment with­in the or­gan­i­sa­tion, its li­a­bil­i­ty pro­grammes as well as cen­tral en­gi­neer­ing pro­grammes.

“We were ac­tu­al­ly re­spon­si­ble for the strate­gic di­rec­tion for what we did with cap­i­tal to sus­tain and ex­pand our fa­cil­i­ties. So I had a port­fo­lio of about US$1.5 bil­lion that we spent across mul­ti­ple fa­cil­i­ties in North Amer­i­ca and Trinidad,” Thomp­son stat­ed.

Nu­trien is the world’s largest provider of crop in­puts and ser­vices with op­er­a­tions and in­vest­ments in 14 coun­tries.

The com­pa­ny’s busi­ness in T&T ac­counts for more than 35 per cent of its glob­al pro­duc­tion port­fo­lio.