RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Just a day af­ter his re­turn from Venezuela, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young proud­ly an­nounced T&T’s achieve­ment in se­cur­ing sub­stan­tial rev­enue from multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions af­ter Gov­ern­ment rene­go­ti­at­ed en­er­gy deals.

Speak­ing in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, Young re­vealed that a team from BP Lim­it­ed ac­com­pa­nied him to Venezuela on Thurs­day to dis­cuss the promis­ing de­vel­op­ment of a gas field in the Man­akin-Cocuina re­gion.

The Man­akin-Cocuina field strad­dles the T&T-Venezuela mar­itime bor­der, off the south­east coast of Trinidad and is es­ti­mat­ed to con­tain just over one tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas.

Deny­ing claims that the PNM regime had no clear en­er­gy poli­cies, Young said if Gov­ern­ment had fol­lowed the UNC’s en­er­gy pol­i­cy, it would have lost out on bil­lions.

“The UNC had been a set of knock knees and cow­ards with multi­na­tion­als. When we en­gaged the multi­na­tion­als re­spect­ful­ly, there was an out­cry that the multi­na­tion­als would pick up and leave. In­stead, they have done the op­po­site. They are now ask­ing us to ne­go­ti­ate with them,” Young re­vealed.

He said by re­struc­tur­ing en­er­gy deals with multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, Gov­ern­ment was able to earn bil­lions of dol­lars for the peo­ple of T&T.

“We rene­go­ti­at­ed all the con­tracts and got bil­lions of dol­lars in rev­enue which we would not have earned if we con­tin­ued with the UNC en­er­gy pol­i­cy,” he said.

Young not­ed that the Gov­ern­ment has been li­ais­ing with oth­er lead­ers on oil pro­duc­tion, as T&T’s oil re­serves were on the de­cline.

“Oil pro­duc­tion from the pe­ri­od 2010 to 2015 dropped from 98,000 to 78,000 bar­rels. That is a 20,000 loss. We are fac­ing a nat­ur­al de­cline of 15,000 to 20,000 bar­rels per year,” he added.

Young said while the Op­po­si­tion lev­els un­fair crit­i­cism, the rest of the world was look­ing on at the lat­est en­er­gy de­vel­op­ments. (See page 15)

“It’s quite re­mark­able that they say we have no plan for oil and gas. I chal­lenge those on the oth­er side to go and do a sim­ple search and see Reuters, Forbes, all the lead­ing en­er­gy news­pa­pers yes­ter­day and the day be­fore with re­ports that I was in Venezuela con­duct­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions on be­half of the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go for a project with BP called Co­quina Man­akin. That is the news that is top of the news in glob­al en­er­gy re­ports of to­day,” he boast­ed.

He said two weeks ago, talks were held with the Min­is­ters of En­er­gy in Egypt, Al­ge­ria and Qatar.

The de­vel­op­ment talks in Venezuela oc­curred fol­low­ing an eas­ing of Unit­ed States sanc­tions against Venezuela.

Reuters News Agency re­port­ed that the fields were uni­tised in 2015 but talks on the de­vel­op­ment were stalled up­on im­po­si­tion of US sanc­tions in 2019 against Venezuela.

Young’s del­e­ga­tion in­clud­ed the min­istry’s Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Pene­lope Brad­shaw-Niles, oth­er key min­istry per­son­nel and ex­ec­u­tives from the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC). Oth­er del­e­gates at the meet­ing were a BP team led by bpTT pres­i­dent David Camp­bell.

The Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment was rep­re­sent­ed by a team led by Pop­u­lar Pow­er for Pe­tro­le­um Min­is­ter Rafael Tel­lechea and his Vice Min­is­ter Juan San­tana.