While energy experts agree that a Cabinet-appointed evaluation team should ensure that the next operator for the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery has the financial and technical resources to resume operations, access to crude oil should not be an issue.
Speaking at the People’s National Movement Sports and Family in San Fernando last Sunday, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley announced that the Cabinet will install a team to assess bids submitted in a month. He said the Government should be able to tell the country whether it has an operator for the old Petrotrin asset by the end of August.
He said they were looking at potential operators with crude oil that T&T did not have.
Former minister of energy and energy affairs Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan said T&T has to be very mindful when choosing the best bidder. She said the preferred bidder should have the requisite expertise to take the plants out of the mothballed state they were in for six years and make them operational in the shortest possible time.
Seepersad-Bachan said they must also have the requisite finances because resumption will be a capital-intensive project.
“It has been mothballed for six years. When the Government evaluates, it should not limit itself to only bidders that have equity in crude because we have seen success stories around the world about refineries that do not own crude. They have strategic partnerships around the world,” Seepersad-Bachan said.
She said research would show refineries had healthy margins in the last few years. When evaluating, she said, analyses cannot be on a short-term basis, as any one-year period cannot paint an accurate picture of a refinery.
During Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) President General Ancel Roget’s Labour Day speech, he said his organisation would not allow anyone to resume operation at the refinery without its involvement.
The OWTU’s Patriotic Energies and Technologies Company is one of the bidders for the refinery. However, Rowley rejected Roget’s demands, saying action on the refinery would not have anything to do with mischievous troublemakers who believe the Government will sit back and take nonsensical talk.
He said one union leader was singing calypso, sending word for him to say that the Government would not be allowed to dispose of the refinery without his and his friends’ permission.
“When you own your own refinery, the Government will not interfere with it. But the refinery owned by the people of Trinidad and Tobago, until you are in the Government or the prime minister, go and sing your calypso to your friends elsewhere and stop talking stupidness,” Rowley said.
Seepersad-Bachan said Roget and Patriotic must be treated separately, like every other bidder. She said the evaluation team must analyse bids to get the highest returns in the country’s interests. She said the resumption of the refinery was not just about dollars but about the employment opportunities and spin-off industries.
Seepersad-Bachan said Petrotrin had trained people for the industry, and after the closure, many went abroad. She is hopeful that the new operator can attract them to the refinery.
Meanwhile, Strategy and Energy Consultant at VSL Consultants, Gregory McGuire, said the preferred bidder should have access to capital to finance the refinery refurbishment and upgrades. He said the current state of the refinery would not be operable as there was always a need to upgrade plants to produce products more efficiently, more price-competitive, and better suited for the market.
He said the preferred bidder should have the technical capacity to recruit experienced and capable personnel.
“We do have in Trinidad and Tobago a whole cadre of experienced workers, and they can draw on that, but in terms of the new technologies available for refining, the preferred bidder ought to have that,” McGuire said.
His third criterion was access to export markets or a distribution network to get refined products out seamlessly.
Fourthly, they must have access to crude oil, which he says is always readily available. While Seepersad-Bachan believes the Government can also seek a partner for the refinery, McGuire says the refinery should be in the private sector’s hands.
“Governments in Trinidad and Tobago have had over 100 years to get the refinery right. Even if we were to go back to 1974, when we first acquired the Trintoc refinery, and later on, into the ‘80s, the Texaco refinery, we have had forty-something years-plus to get it right, and we have not succeeded in getting it right for a host of reasons.”