An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says in decades to come T&T will still be a nat­ur­al gas-ex­port­ing coun­try.

Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley made the com­ment at the en­er­gy town hall seg­ment on day one of the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day.

He in­di­cat­ed there will still be de­mand for en­er­gy from hy­dro­car­bons in 2050.

Row­ley said even if peo­ple stop pro­duc­ing and us­ing in­ter­nal com­bus­tion en­gines, the de­mand will ex­ist across oth­er in­dus­tries.

“The bot­tom line is, 27 years from to­day, I would think that T&T will still be a gas-ex­port­ing coun­try even if we would have used up most of the gas on our bor­der. There is se­ri­ous Eu­ro­pean in­ter­est in what is hap­pen­ing in T&T as it at­tempts to bring to mar­ket re­sources from South Amer­i­ca. So, giv­en what the world’s geopol­i­tics has turned out to be, a lot of in­ter­est ex­ists now in hav­ing se­cu­ri­ty for fu­el out of an area that is tra­di­tion­al­ly sta­ble,” he said.

Touch­ing on the green en­er­gy as­pect that the world is cur­rent­ly mov­ing to­wards, the Prime Min­is­ter said the cur­rent costs as­so­ci­at­ed with those ven­tures are re­stric­tive.

“The cost of green­ing, car­bon cap­ture, and so on, is a huge cost and these are not costs that can be ab­sorbed by the Gov­ern­ment. We just don’t have the ca­pac­i­ty and we cer­tain­ly can’t com­mit our lim­it­ed fi­nances to the risks of those things,” Row­ley stressed.

How­ev­er, he said when the costs are with­in a doable range, T&T will play a big­ger role, adding that the gov­ern­ment has en­gaged in projects such as so­lar pow­er, ap­par­ent­ly re­fer­ring to the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny’s in­vest­ment of 30 per cent in Light­source so­lar project.

“We can do more of that if we are in a bet­ter po­si­tion to par­tic­i­pate, but we need to over­come the cost chal­lenges so that if we have a larg­er green in­put in­to our in­fra­struc­ture, Point Lisas will be­come a di­a­mond, not on­ly for us but in the world econ­o­my and that’s what we are aim­ing for,” Row­ley ex­plained.

Al­so speak­ing at the con­fer­ence was En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, who not­ed that the suc­cess­ful re­struc­tur­ing of At­lantic LNG is a mat­ter of high im­por­tance not on­ly for the coun­try, but to all our up­stream play­ers as well.

The re­struc­tured own­er­ship and com­mer­cial frame­work, Young said, will pro­vide these up­stream com­pa­nies with the clar­i­ty nec­es­sary for sanc­tion­ing the next wave of up­stream gas projects.