US gas prices to rise due to Harvey

He said a lot of the engineering and planning work for Trinidad and Tobago takes place in Houston and a lot of the managerial work for the industry also relies on activity taking place in Houston so the closure of the sector there will have a temporary impact on Trinidad.

He added that all of the major oil companies in Trinidad will have offices in Houston or rely on services coming out of Houston.

Driver said it was a very tragic situation for the people of Houston and as far as he has been able to find out, all TT citizens working in the energy sector there were safe.

In Trinidad, a spokesman for bpTT said the company’s operations continue as normal and it is monitoring the situation in line with its usual safety practice. Officials at other energy companies operating in TT also said their businesses were not affected.

According to news reports, the ten oil refineries in Houston and Corpus Christi, an export hub for energy deliveries to Latin America and Asia, which were forced to close because of Hurricane Harvey normally had the capacity to refine about two million barrels of oil a day. Among the facilities which were forced to close was Exxon Mobil’s Baytown refinery, the second largest in the US about 25 miles east of Houston, which employed about 7,000 people and had a processing capacity of up to 584,000 barrels of crude oil per day.