Cur­tis Williams &

Gail Alexan­der

Trinidad and To­ba­go is like­ly to de­vel­op all of the 10 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas in the Lo­ran and Man­a­tee gas fields, ac­cord­ing to En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklyn Khan.

Speak­ing at the Hy­att Re­gency on Tues­day, on the sec­ond day of the En­er­gy Cham­ber’s 2020 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence, Khan said while the agree­ment is to in­de­pen­dent­ly de­vel­op the Man­a­tee and Lo­ran fields, it was log­i­cal to as­sume that once first gas comes to T&T, then the Venezue­lans al­so are like­ly to al­low the re­sources in Lo­ran to be pro­duced here, as well.

He point­ed out that there was no in­fra­struc­ture in East­ern Venezuela for the gas and with the like­li­hood that the Bo­li­var­i­an Re­pub­lic will need cash for some time to come, it would make sense to have the gas sent to T&T in re­turn for cash.

On Mon­day Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced that the gov­ern­ments of T&T and Venezuela had de­cid­ed to re­scind their cross bor­der agree­ment for the fields be­cause US sanc­tions had made it all but im­pos­si­ble to de­vel­op the fields joint­ly.

Khan rub­bished the head­lines in Tues­day’s dai­ly news­pa­pers say­ing the gas deals were not dead, but rather have new life. He sug­gest­ed that a more ap­pro­pri­ate head­line should have been: “The Man­a­tee eats the Drag­on”.

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter said the Man­a­tee Deal is a game-chang­er since it is like­ly to add up to 400 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of gas per day for 15 years.

This, he in­sist­ed, will bring to an end the con­tin­ued nat­ur­al gas short­ages.

Lat­er in the Sen­ate, Khan as­sured that the de­lay in the start of the Drag­on Field gas project will have no ad­verse im­pact on the do­mes­tic gas sup­ply. He said Drag­on Field pro­duc­tion wasn’t fac­tored in­to the Min­istry’s fore­cast.

He said gas pro­duc­tion was ex­pect­ed to in­crease by 2024 and the Loren Man­a­tee field will come on stream al­so, adding about 270-400 mil­lion cu­bic feet of gas per day.

On gas sup­ply for Pt Lisas, Khan said Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) is in “very del­i­cate talks” with the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor. He said a gas con­tract has been con­clud­ed re­gard­ing that sec­tor and a cou­ple of out­stand­ing ones have to be set­tled al­so.

Khan al­so said no ad­verse is­sues have been re­port­ed to se­cu­ri­ty or main­te­nance units at Petrotrin’s Au­gus­tus Long hos­pi­tal or the for­mer com­pa­ny’s health cen­tres.

He said no fi­nal de­ci­sion has been made to re­open these cen­tres - but at the end of Petrotrin’s two-year me­di­al in­sur­ance plan, a fi­nal de­ci­sion would be tak­en on how to pro­ceed with these med­ical fa­cil­i­ties. He said they’ve all been se­cured and drugs from these cen­tres dis­trib­uted to re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties.