The first of 16 ship­ments of re­fined fu­el ar­rived in T&T last Sat­ur­day, de­liv­ered un­der an agree­ment with BP’s Latin Amer­i­ca In­te­grat­ed Sales and Trad­ing group.

Its de­liv­ery marked the shift away from the re­fin­ing of crude by Petrotrin to im­port­ing of re­fined fu­els and ex­port­ing of crude oil and one of the sig­nif­i­cant de­vel­op­ments since the phased shut­down of the 100-year-old Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery start­ed on Oc­to­ber.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from Petrotrin yes­ter­day, the oth­er fu­el ship­ments will ar­rive over the next four months.

On Tues­day, Petrotrin loaded ap­prox­i­mate­ly 500,000 bar­rels of Mo­lo (medi­um oc­tane low oc­tane) crude oil on­to the tanker Hell­s­point Progress—its first ship­ment of oil for ex­port. The crude was pur­chased by Trafigu­ra Oil Traders Lim­it­ed.

In keep­ing with re­struc­tur­ing time­lines and the tran­si­tion to the new en­er­gy com­pa­nies—Paria Fu­el Trad­ing and Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed—gaso­line, diesel, avi­a­tion fu­el, and oth­er re­fined prod­ucts the coun­try needs—es­ti­mat­ed at around 25,000 bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent a day—will be im­port­ed and all crude oil pro­duc­tion will be ex­port­ed.

At the start of its shut­down, the re­fin­ery was pro­duc­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 40,000 bar­rels of oil a day and was op­er­at­ing at a ca­pac­i­ty of 140,000 bar­rels a day. Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100,000 bar­rels of oil had to be im­port­ed to make up the short­fall.

In ear­ly Oc­to­ber, Gov­ern­ment is­sued a re­quest for pro­pos­als from 13 oil traders to pur­chase 25,000 bar­rels a day of re­fined prod­ucts as it starts de­com­mis­sion­ing the re­fin­ery. At that time, there were 20 days of in­ven­to­ry left at the fa­cil­i­ty to meet do­mes­tic needs.

Once the phased shut­down is com­plet­ed on No­vem­ber 30, the re­fin­ery will be seg­re­gat­ed and treat­ed as a stand-alone as­set as Gov­ern­ment con­sid­ers the fu­ture for the fa­cil­i­ty.