The En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T says it wel­comes the US gov­ern­ment’s grant­i­ng of a waiv­er for this coun­try to be able to de­vel­op the Drag­on Field.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, speak­ing dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, an­nounced the US gov­ern­ment’s ap­proval for T&T to de­vel­op the Drag­on Gas Field, which lies just about 17 kilo­me­tres across the bor­der from our ac­tive Hi­bis­cus plat­form.

“What this means is that the re­stric­tions on the Drag­on Gas Field de­vel­op­ment is now re­lieved and all rel­e­vant par­ties can progress the plans to re­sult in nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela even­tu­al­ly flow­ing from these proven re­serves to T&T then on­to Caribbean, Eu­ro­pean and oth­er mar­kets, bring­ing much hu­man­i­tar­i­an ben­e­fits to the Venezue­lan pop­u­la­tion and greater en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty to the Caribbean re­gion,” Row­ley stat­ed.

In an al­most im­me­di­ate re­sponse, the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T laud­ed the move.

“The En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T wel­comes the news of the grant­i­ng of the US Trea­sury De­part­ment OFAC waiv­er of the sanc­tions that have been pre­vent­ing T&T from work­ing with PDVSA on the ex­port of nat­ur­al gas,” the En­er­gy Cham­ber said.

“This presents a ma­jor op­por­tu­ni­ty for T&T to be­gin the im­por­ta­tion of nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela,” it added.

This is­sue was a ma­jor top­ic of dis­cus­sion at the on­go­ing T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence and specif­i­cal­ly, the pan­el dis­cus­sion on Mon­day which looked at the in­te­gra­tion of the south­ern Caribbean gas net­works, it stat­ed.

“The pan­el iden­ti­fied a ma­jor po­ten­tial op­por­tu­ni­ty for T&T to be­come a gas pro­cess­ing hub for the vast nat­ur­al gas re­sources in Venezuela and po­ten­tial­ly oth­er neigh­bour­ing coun­tries,” the En­er­gy Cham­ber not­ed.

Kevin Ramnarine

For­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine al­so con­grat­u­lat­ed Row­ley on the sit­u­a­tion.

“I think it’s good news and con­grat­u­la­tions to the Prime Min­is­ter for his diplo­mat­ic per­sis­tence. From my ex­pe­ri­ence, these are very com­plex is­sues. I ex­pect, how­ev­er, that the jour­ney to first gas has now start­ed and a lot of work lays ahead for the NGC and the Gov­ern­ment,” Ram­nar­ine said.

“I ex­pect that if all goes to plan, we should see first gas in three to four years. This would mark a new phase in our en­er­gy sec­tor where we move to im­port nat­ur­al gas. This has to be thought through care­ful­ly from a com­mer­cial and fis­cal point of view but over­all, the news would be wel­comed for the plants at Point Lisas and the LNG busi­ness in Point Fortin,” he added.