GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Jour­nal­ist

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Gov­ern­ment will know with­in four months whether the Petrotrin re­fin­ery in Pointe-a-Pierre can be restart­ed and what the cost of do­ing so will be.

This was the promise yes­ter­day from for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine, who is head­ing a com­mit­tee set up to de­ter­mine the fea­si­bil­i­ty of re­open­ing the re­fin­ery.

“The com­mit­tee that was se­lect­ed by the Cab­i­net is vast­ly ex­pe­ri­enced and I thank them for com­ing for­ward to serve in this im­por­tant ex­er­cise,” Ram­nar­ine told Guardian Me­dia of the team he has to work on the as­sign­ment.

“In a nut­shell, the man­date is re­al­ly to pro­vide a tech­ni­cal as­sess­ment of the state of the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery and what it would its restart would re­quire.”

Ram­nar­ine point­ed out that the re­fin­ery has been moth­balled since 2018, and its clo­sure has had a ma­jor im­pact on the coun­try’s econ­o­my, its en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty and its po­si­tion in the re­gion.

More­over, he em­pha­sised that the fall­out has had a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on south Trinidad, the work­ers and the con­tract­ing com­mu­ni­ty that sup­port­ed the re­fin­ery’s op­er­a­tions.

On the pos­si­ble date of a restart and the cost, Ram­nar­ine said these things would be de­ter­mined when the work of the com­mit­tee is com­plet­ed and sub­mit­ted to the Cab­i­net for con­sid­er­a­tion.

With the com­pa­ny los­ing bil­lions an­nu­al­ly, the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment gov­ern­ment shut the re­fin­ery down, leav­ing more than 3,500 per­ma­nent and 1,200 non-per­ma­nent work­ers un­em­ployed.

Reper­cus­sions were felt be­yond the re­fin­ery gates in sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties like Gas­par­il­lo and Clax­ton Bay via busi­ness clo­sures and job loss­es.

In Feb­ru­ary, OAN­DO PLC, a Niger­ian com­pa­ny, was se­lect­ed as the pre­ferred bid­der to take over the re­fin­ery un­der the last gov­ern­ment, but the cur­rent Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress ad­min­is­tra­tion re­peat­ed­ly stat­ed dur­ing the Gen­er­al Elec­tion cam­paign that it would work with the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) to restart the re­fin­ery’s op­er­a­tions.

A High Court rul­ing re­cent­ly found that the OW­TU and its as­so­ci­at­ed com­pa­ny, Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies Ltd, were li­able for over US$4 mil­lion in loans it se­cured for its bid to ac­quire the re­fin­ery af­ter it was closed.

In a re­cent in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, en­er­gy ex­pert and for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan had said there is a need for a rep­utable in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestor to re­open the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.

She said she be­lieved the re­open­ing of the re­fin­ery should have been a col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach and one that in­volved reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight, with pri­vate sec­tor in­vestors.

“Bear in mind that if you have to ap­proach the in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial mar­kets for debt fi­nanc­ing. They are go­ing to want to look for some form of eq­ui­ty fi­nanc­ing, even if it is as much as 10-15 per cent of that to­tal. Fi­nan­cial cap­i­tal out­lay, which we ex­pect to be about US$1 bil­lion,” Seep­er­sad-Bachan said.