The rhetoric over gas

IT IS IMPORTANT, of course, for Trinidad and Tobago to inform the world of its success in exploiting its considerable energy resources. The more people we tell, the more assured we should be of maintaining or even increasing the flow of foreign investment into our country. So the mission of Energy Minister Eric Williams to two major conferences to be held in Houston, Texas, shortly must have TT’s full support.

At the third annual Latin American Oil and Gas conference of the Centre for Business Intelligence, the Minister will outline to participants TT’s achievement in creating “a win-win situation for energy investments.”  He says: “As a country, we are the site of, if not the largest, the second largest amount of foreign direct investment in our hemisphere and we are being asked to share our winning formula with the rest of not just the industry but other countries of our region.” At the the conference of the International Quality Productivity Centre (IQPC), Minister Williams will present a paper on how important LNG from TT is to the US market. He revealed at a press briefing on Thursday that at present TT is the world’s fifth largest LNG exporter and the number one supplier of LNG to the United States. “Last year,” he said, “our market share was of the order of 66 percent, which is about two thirds of LNG exports to the US.”

In terms of rhetoric, the Minister creates a confident and reassuring picture of TT’s economic strength based on the monetisation of its increasingly large gas resources. We expect that his participation in these two important conferences plus the discussions he will have with company executives in Texas will serve to enhance the development of our energy sector. But while we support these promotional initiatives and while our achievements in the industry appear impressive, the fact remains that the population of our country, to whom these resources belong, are still totally ignorant of the real value of our natural gas industry in terms of the agreements we have made with the exploiting multinationals and the extent of the revenue the country derives from these arrangements. There appears to be, in fact, a deliberate intent by the Government to keep this aspect of our natural gas development a secret, in spite of its vaunted commitment to transparency and accountability. How does our people know that the country is getting its fair share of the gas pie with the foreign corporations? If little TT is the number one supplier of LNG to the mighty United States, providing two-thirds of its imports, what is this premier position worth to us? How much, in solid, liquid cash, are we deriving from it?

In his 2004 Budget statement, Finance Minister Patrick Manning outlined major developments in the energy sector, including approval for constructing Atlantic LNG Train IV with a capacity of 5.2 million tonnes per annum but, oddly enough, the Minister chose not to reveal the quantum of revenue his government expected to derive from the natural gas industry. The omission seems more puzzling in light of his admission that “the energy resources of Trinidad and Tobago are the patrimony of every citizen” and should be used to improve their lives. The Minister based his Budget on a projected oil price of US $25 per barrel but gave no idea of the income he expected from the expanding gas sector. Will he ever tell us why?