DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

The en­er­gy sec­tor may see some pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ments soon, ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries (MEEI) Stu­art Young.

As he con­tributed to the de­bate on the mid-year bud­get re­view in the Up­per House yes­ter­day, Young hint­ed at a po­ten­tial de­vel­op­ment af­ter dis­clos­ing that ear­li­er he met with ex­ec­u­tives from Rep­sol, the Span­ish multi­na­tion­al en­er­gy and petro­chem­i­cal com­pa­ny based in Madrid.

“Next week you will see some­thing else hap­pen and these are the po­si­tions of hope. These are the in­stances that are ma­te­r­i­al and tan­gi­ble that pro­vide a fu­ture for Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Young said.

Al­though he did not pro­vide fur­ther de­tails, he took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­fend the gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts to en­sure fu­ture gas sup­ply from Venezuela, which boasts the largest oil re­serves in the world.

He said the gov­ern­ment is not putting all of its eggs in the Drag­on Gas field, call­ing those com­ments “com­plete­ly un­true”. He sought to re­mind the pub­lic that the gov­ern­ment has an arrange­ment with Wood­side for deep­wa­ter gas and a suc­cess­ful shal­low wa­ter bid round.

Boast­ing that the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment is mak­ing progress to se­cure the fu­ture pop­u­la­tion, he sought to re­mind the pub­lic that two weeks ago, Trinidad and To­ba­go got an­oth­er spe­cif­ic li­cence from the Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC), De­part­ment of Trea­sury of the Unit­ed States for the Cocuina-Man­akin field.

He said de­spite some crit­ics be­liev­ing bp would pull out of T&T, they are still on board.

“The same bp that they were scream­ing at to leave the ta­ble is right there with us as we con­tin­ue to ne­go­ti­ate,” he said.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy is seek­ing $570 mil­lion in sup­ple­men­tal in­come for this fis­cal year.