Gail Alexan­der

En­er­gy Min­is­ter, Stu­art Young, said yes­ter­day that some tem­po­rary dif­fi­cul­ties in the sup­ply of nat­ur­al gas from one of the ma­jor nat­ur­al gas up­stream sup­pli­ers have af­fect­ed some of the plants at Point Lisas, but up to yes­ter­day, some plants were be­ing restart­ed as they got gas.

Young gave the in­for­ma­tion in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, re­spond­ing to UNC Sen­a­tor Wade Mark’s queries about mea­sures be­ing tak­en to ad­dress the “shut­down of cook­ing gas pro­duc­tion” and sev­er­al petro­chem­i­cal plants at Point Lisas “trig­gered by an elec­tri­cal fire at BPTT’s Ma­hogany hub.”

Young re­peat­ed Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Lim­it­ed (PPG­PL) as­sur­ances of no cook­ing gas short­age and said that PPG­PL’s pro­cess­ing units were down for rou­tine main­te­nance works that were in plan­ning for over a year.

Mark asked Young to con­firm whether the M IV methanol plant, Trin­gen II am­mo­nia plant and three of five Nu­trien am­mo­nia plants at Point Lisas were down due to a lack of nat­ur­al gas sup­ply.

Young said, “Plants at Point Lisas from time to time—sim­i­lar to PPG­PL—have to go down to do rou­tine main­te­nance works. Some of those plants will fall in­to that cat­e­go­ry.”

Young said Mark’s query about a fire at the Ma­hogany plat­form was ex­plained by a bpTT news re­lease, adding that the fire had noth­ing to do with the state of any of the plants at Point Lisas. He said bpTT said it was a small fire on a tem­po­rary piece of equip­ment and the sit­u­a­tion was back to nor­mal pro­duc­tion lev­el.

Young added, “What I can say is there have been some tem­po­rary dif­fi­cul­ties in gas sup­ply from one of our ma­jor nat­ur­al gas up­stream sup­pli­ers that have af­fect­ed some of the plants at Point Lisas. Some of these plants are al­so util­is­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty and the time to do rou­tine main­te­nance.”

“It doesn’t mean we’re not al­ways con­cerned about con­sis­tent gas sup­plies from up­stream pro­duc­ers, whom the Gov­ern­ment and NGC have ab­solute­ly no con­trol over what hap­pens with re­spect to their pro­duc­tion, save to be in a po­si­tion as we’ve done con­sis­tent­ly to en­sure that all that needs to be done on our part is done so there’ll be a main­tained pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al gas.”

Young said, “As we’re speak­ing, some of the plants re­ferred to by Sen­a­tor Mark are on their way to be­ing restart­ed as they get gas sup­ply.”

New trade agency be­fore year-end

On oth­er queries, from In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Am­ri­ta De­onar­ine, Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon said the pro­posed es­tab­lish­ment of a sin­gle trade and in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion en­ti­ty, the T&T Trade and In­vest­ment Pro­mo­tion Agency (TT­TI­PA), will be be­fore year-end.

To this end, the Min­istry has en­gaged the ser­vices of a hu­man re­source and in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions con­sul­tant, and a change man­age­ment and com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tant.

She added, “With In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) sup­port, ad­di­tion­al con­sul­tan­cies will be ex­e­cut­ed for HR sup­port and de­vel­op­ment of the in­sti­tu­tion­al gov­er­nance frame­work for the agency; dig­i­tal tools and sys­tems, and strate­gic plan.”

She said the change man­age­ment and HR/IR con­sul­tan­cies com­menced in Jan­u­ary and March 2023 re­spec­tive­ly. The IDB iden­ti­fied a pre­ferred con­sul­tant who was to com­mence work this month.

“In­vestTT, ex­porTT and Cre­ativeTT are cur­rent­ly tak­ing ac­tion to com­plete the amal­ga­ma­tion process, which in­volves sen­si­tive le­gal and HR and in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions is­sues that must be treat­ed with the high­est lev­el of care and de­tail. Among the crit­i­cal and sen­si­tive is­sues that are be­ing ad­dressed in­clude val­u­a­tion of the en­ti­ties, treat­ment of shares and treat­ment of unionised em­ploy­ees,” she added.

Up­on com­ple­tion of all ac­tiv­i­ties, the le­gal es­tab­lish­ment of the agency will oc­cur fol­low­ing ap­proval of the Ar­ti­cles of Amal­ga­ma­tion of the new en­ti­ty by the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al, pro­ject­ed to oc­cur be­fore the end of the fis­cal year.

“It’s an­tic­i­pat­ed it will be es­tab­lished be­fore the end of fis­cal 2023...there have been no sig­nif­i­cant de­lays re­port­ed.”