The Gov­ern­ment must pro­vide more clar­i­ty con­cern­ing the Petro­jam deal with Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny, the whol­ly state-owned fu­el im­porter.

This was the call made by Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice po­lit­i­cal leader David Ab­du­lah on Sun­day dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence.

Ab­du­lah crit­i­cised Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s re­sponse to en­er­gy ex­pert Tony Paul’s com­ments on the deal.

The ge­ol­o­gist had raised ques­tions about the op­er­at­ing ca­pac­i­ty and po­ten­tial of the Petro­jam re­fin­ery lead­ing to the Prime Min­is­ter stat­ing the in­di­vid­ual had a per­son­al grudge.

How­ev­er, Ab­du­lah felt the com­ments made by the ex­pert, which were al­so raised dur­ing the MSJ’s Tues­day Talks pro­gramme, de­served to be ad­dressed prop­er­ly.

“That is what we are call­ing up­on Paria to state, we want pre­cise in­for­ma­tion and that is what Dr Row­ley should have pro­vid­ed. Not a per­son­al at­tack,” said Ab­du­lah.

He list­ed ques­tions, “How much is the ac­tu­al through­put of the Petro­jam re­fin­ery? What per­cent­age of that is fu­el oil? Of that fu­el oil that it pro­duces, how much of that is used with­in the Ja­maican do­mes­tic mar­ket? And there­fore what is avail­able, if any, to be able to sell to Paria? And how much of that is very low sul­phur fu­el oil?”

The MSJ leader al­so ques­tioned the de­ci­sion to use the Petro­jam re­fin­ery, not­ing that while the lo­cal re­fin­ery was old­er it had been up­grad­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly and as such had be­come a more ver­sa­tile and ef­fi­cient op­er­a­tion.

“There were con­stant up­grades, some of those up­grades had to do with mod­ernising the whole con­trol sys­tems so in­stead of man­u­al con­trols we had elec­tron­ic con­trols, con­sol­i­dat­ing con­trol rooms so op­er­a­tors didn’t’ have to go out on the plant and ad­just valves and so on. They could do that sit­ting down in the con­trol room sit­ting down elec­tron­i­cal­ly. They did oth­er kinds of ma­jor up­grade works to the plants in­clud­ing the cat crack­er and oth­ers to make them more ef­fi­cient,” said Ab­du­lah, “(The Petrotrin re­fin­ery) was pro­duc­ing less fu­el oil be­cause it used to pro­duce 50/55 per cent fu­el oil which was the low­est val­ue prod­uct sim­i­lar to Petro­jam’s re­fin­ery.”

He con­tin­ued, “But the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery end­ed up to­wards the end pro­duc­ing 30 per cent fu­el oil, 70 per cent high­er val­ue prod­ucts and gaso­line, kerosene and oth­er avi­a­tion fu­el and oth­er prod­ucts like that.”

He al­so coun­tered En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young rea­son­ing for the deal, ar­gu­ing that these up­grades would make the process eas­i­er.

“The up­grades were very sig­nif­i­cant and there­fore would have made it a more ef­fi­cient re­fin­ery than the Petro­jam re­fin­ery. Con­trary to what Mr Young said that Petro­jam would have been a sim­pler op­er­a­tion. Be­cause it is small­er does not nec­es­sar­i­ly make it eas­i­er to run. It may be eas­i­er in that the through­put is less but if the val­ue of prod­ucts is bet­ter com­ing out of Pointe-a-Pierre,” said Ab­du­lah.