While for­mer prime min­is­ter and ex-en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young has ac­cused Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar of tak­ing full cred­it for the pro­duc­tion-shar­ing con­tract (PSC) with Exxon­Mo­bil, the Prime Min­is­ter ap­peared un­fazed.

Though she did not re­spond di­rect­ly to Young’s re­marks, Per­sad-Bisses­sar told re­porters yes­ter­day at TSTT’s Fu­ture Lead­ers In­tern­ship func­tion at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre that she was fo­cused on the po­ten­tial ben­e­fits of the agree­ment.

"Look, we live in a coun­try of free speech, every­body has their opin­ion. My opin­ion is that this is a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for Trinidad and To­ba­go. The naysay­ers, you will al­ways have them,” she said in re­sponse to ques­tions about whether she be­lieved the crit­i­cism was po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed.

The agree­ment, signed on Tues­day, could see Exxon­Mo­bil in­vest be­tween US$16.4 bil­lion and US$21.7 bil­lion in ul­tra-deep­wa­ter blocks with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s ter­ri­to­r­i­al wa­ters if ini­tial seis­mic and tech­ni­cal stud­ies for Block TTUD-1 prove suc­cess­ful. How­ev­er, Exxon­Mo­bil’s top ge­ol­o­gist has cau­tioned that there is no guar­an­tee of a com­mer­cial dis­cov­ery.

Fol­low­ing the sign­ing, Young crit­i­cised the Gov­ern­ment, in­sist­ing that the ground­work was laid un­der the pre­vi­ous Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“It was the PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion that en­gaged Exxon­Mo­bil and com­menced the ne­go­ti­a­tions for the ul­tra-deep­wa­ter blocks with them. In fact, it was pos­si­ble for us to have ap­proved the PSC terms pri­or to the April 28 elec­tion, but we de­cid­ed not to rush it,” Young said.

He ar­gued that the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment had “done very lit­tle to noth­ing” to com­plete the arrange­ment and warned against cre­at­ing un­re­al­is­tic ex­pec­ta­tions.

“This is yet an­oth­er bla­tant mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion to the pop­u­la­tion,” he added, re­call­ing what he de­scribed as a sim­i­lar false claim of a ma­jor oil find dur­ing the 2010–2015 pe­ri­od.

“If there are hy­dro­car­bons in the ul­tra-deep wa­ter blocks, it will take at least 15 to 20 years to come to mar­ket. So whilst I am hap­py that a PSC has been signed, it has lit­tle to do with the UNC and it cer­tain­ly will not help us for an­oth­er 15 years.”

The En­er­gy Cham­ber, for its part, praised the agree­ment, high­light­ing that com­bin­ing sev­en blocks in­to one con­tract “cre­ates a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty” by re­duc­ing ex­plo­ration and de­vel­op­ment risks and sim­pli­fy­ing in­ter­ac­tions with the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries.