A week af­ter Ni­Quan’s Gas to Liq­uids (GTL) plant was tri­umphant­ly opened by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, it is ei­ther not mak­ing any of the promised diesel for ex­port or if it is, the plant is do­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than its ca­pac­i­ty.

The Busi­ness Guardian has been told that the plant is at this time mak­ing wax but no diesel but Ains­ley Gill, Group CEO of Ni­Quan En­er­gy has de­nied this, on­ly ad­mit­ting that it is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing what he calls “teething prob­lems.”

In a tele­phone in­ter­view on Mon­day Gill said; “Teething chal­lenges are cor­rect. We are mak­ing diesel, we are mak­ing wax, we are mak­ing Naph­ta, every­thing in a point in time, wax, Naph­ta, diesel. We have been cir­cu­lat­ing it in our frac­tion­a­tor as well as in our hy­dro­c­rack­er, so we have prod­uct in our tanks. But it’s in a small quan­ti­ty be­cause we are go­ing through a teething is­sue.”

Gill in­sist­ed that the teething prob­lem was not unique to pro­cess­ing plants and his com­pa­ny should ex­pect to have prob­lems at the start.

“It’s just nat­ur­al to the en­vi­ron­ment, we’ll get it right but it’s a teething is­sue. Name­plate ca­pac­i­ty will be met, that is not the is­sue, it’s get­ting the prod­uct on spec (spec­i­fi­ca­tion), the fine-tun­ing as­pect of it, every plant in this coun­try went through it.”

Last week, the Prime Min­is­ter laud­ed Ni­Quan’s start up of the project, promis­ing $2 bil­lion in tax­es dur­ing the life of the project.

Row­ley crowed, “This gas-to-liq­uids plant is a prime ex­am­ple of the suc­cess­ful de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try’s ex­port po­ten­tial of high­er val­ue-added prod­ucts, through the col­lab­o­ra­tion of the pri­vate sec­tor, the bank­ing sec­tor and the Gov­ern­ment.

“Let me con­grat­u­late Ni­Quan and all par­ties in­volved in see­ing this project through to com­ple­tion. I wish Ni­Quan the great­est suc­cess in its fu­ture op­er­a­tions be­cause its suc­cess re­dounds to the coun­try’s ben­e­fit and that of all its cit­i­zens.”

Row­ley said at the open­ing that Ni­Quan had led the plant out of the “junk­yard”, per­haps ref­er­enc­ing back to 2012 when then Petrotrin chair­man Lind­say Gillette said the al­ready bil­lion-dol­lar plant should be sold as scrap iron to help re­coup some of the mas­sive loss­es.

“I have said be­fore that the in­ter­nal man­age­ment of the project by Petrotrin and WGTL was an un­de­ni­able fail­ure, and this re­mains true. How­ev­er, for­tu­nate­ly for this gas-to-liq­uids plant, the Petrotrin and WGTL fail­ure was not the end of the road. The Gov­ern­ment set out to make the best of a sit­u­a­tion over which we had lit­tle con­trol in the past,” he said.

Row­ley said he recog­nised the Ni­Quan project as an op­por­tu­ni­ty for the coun­try to gain some ben­e­fit from an in­vest­ment “which oth­er­wise could not have been op­er­a­tionalised.”

“The Gov­ern­ment fa­cil­i­tat­ed this project by sourc­ing and se­cur­ing a sup­ply of gas to the plant, to a max­i­mum of 31 mm­scf per day, through the T&T Up­stream Down­stream En­er­gy Op­er­a­tions Com­pa­ny Ltd,” he said.

Gill boast­ed that GTL was the fu­ture, with clean diesel in the midst of in­creas­ing moves to re­duce our car­bon foot­print due to cli­mate change con­cerns.

“GTL rep­re­sents clean en­er­gy—a bridge from a dirty en­er­gy past to a clean­er en­er­gy fu­ture. It’s a bridge that every­one want­ed to build but, for many rea­sons, most of them have failed. With this plant, Ni­Quan En­er­gy has built the first bridge and there will be more, many more. And not just in T&T and the Amer­i­c­as but around the world. Our clean en­er­gy prod­ucts will make a dif­fer­ence. That’s the be­lief that’s dri­ven us from day one. It’s what we promised to de­liv­er and we’ve kept our promise here to­day,” Gill said.

Ini­tial­ly, Gill was in­sist­ing that there was no is­sue with the pro­duc­tion of the diesel and said the com­pa­ny was ac­cus­tomed to keep­ing its busi­ness in­ter­nal­ly.

“As you would ap­pre­ci­ate we keep a lot of things for all of the right rea­sons in­ter­nal­ly, not be­cause we don’t want to dis­close it but be­cause we have to run our busi­ness in a very man­aged way,” he said.

Told we were aware that the plant was not mak­ing diesel Gill re­tort­ed, “There is spec­u­la­tion, please don’t treat it dif­fer­ent­ly to mak­ing up for Ni­Quan be­cause every­body else takes the op­por­tu­ni­ty to look to us for fail­ure as op­posed to suc­cess, just be­cause of the unique­ness of this project.”

“It would be ab­solute­ly 100 per cent in­cor­rect that we’re not pro­duc­ing, we’re pro­duc­ing prod­uct. We have prod­uct in our tanks and so any­body who is mak­ing those rep­re­sen­ta­tions will all be from a ma­li­cious point of view. Com­mer­cial quan­ti­ty is any­thing you can do to sell. We’re com­mer­cial, you have to de­fine com­mer­cial.”

Asked if the plant was pro­duc­ing its ex­pect­ed dai­ly amount of 2,640 bar­rels of prod­uct, Gill told the Busi­ness Guardian, “No we are not pro­duc­ing that at this point in time. We’re in the pro­duc­tion stage. In any plant start­ing up, es­pe­cial­ly ours which has been for a long time, you start it up slow­ly, so any­body who is giv­ing you rep­re­sen­ta­tions is a very ma­li­cious per­son.”

He added, “The plant does 2,640 pe­ri­od! What we are do­ing is tak­ing it slow to get to that, it just re­quires it. Then you go and you run it at par­tic­u­lar rates, you get sta­bil­i­sa­tion, you line your plant down. So don’t take some­thing that is nat­ur­al to the in­dus­try be­cause we don’t want to go and wrap it and fast and stress in­tegri­ty to make up for some­body else. We keep our busi­ness very close. So any­body mak­ing those rep­re­sen­ta­tions are ab­solute­ly con­sis­tent with what I have been see­ing in the mar­ket, fab­ri­ca­tion.”

Gill said Ni­Quan’s first car­go is des­tined to be in the mar­ket in April.

He said all of Ni­Quan’s prod­ucts will be sold in ex­ter­nal mar­kets with the first ship­ment be­ing 60,000.

“Cur­tis I am tired of peo­ple just look­ing to say things, this is a coun­try where peo­ple just make things up and they think they are hap­py with it. They have to stop that,” Gill end­ed.