GUARDIAN ME­DIA NEWS­ROOM

Don­ald Trump's vic­to­ry at the polls could bring sig­nif­i­cant changes to Trinidad and To­ba­go's en­er­gy sec­tor, warns for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine.

Ac­cord­ing to Ram­nar­ine, T&T may no longer ben­e­fit from the Biden Ad­min­is­tra­tion's pause on liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas ex­port ap­provals.

He says this will give way for the US to con­duct more drilling—which is a key pol­i­cy po­si­tion Trump cam­paigned up­on—to boost its own in­dus­try, dri­ving down in­ter­na­tion­al prices.

“We are ex­porters of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas. It’s one of the ways in which we earn the US Dol­lar, which is be­com­ing scarcer and scarcer and more dif­fi­cult to ac­cess,” the for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter not­ed.

“Pres­i­dent Biden had im­posed a mora­to­ri­um on new LNG ex­port projects. I think Pres­i­dent Trump will re­verse that mora­to­ri­um very quick­ly,” he be­lieves, “and there­fore, you will have the build­ing of new LNG ex­port projects in the Unit­ed States, which in­creas­es their ex­port ca­pac­i­ty.”

And while mil­lions of im­mi­grants are now con­cerned about mass de­por­ta­tions, Ram­nar­ine says the new Trump Ad­min­is­tra­tion will have to con­sid­er the long-term ef­fects of such a pol­i­cy move.

“He might be aware that if he turns the screws too tight­ly on Venezuela and caus­es fur­ther eco­nom­ic de­cline, you may have an in­creased ex­o­dus of Venezue­lans to­wards the Unit­ed States, or to­wards oth­er coun­tries in the re­gion,” Ram­nar­ine ob­served.

He added: “The is­sue of Venezuela does in­tro­duce a lev­el of un­cer­tain­ty that hith­er­to No­vem­ber 5, 2024, was not there.”

Don­ald Trump, the Re­pub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee, won the pres­i­den­cy for the sec­ond time on Tues­day, be­com­ing the 47th Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.