PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

For­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young has warned whol­ly state-owned Na­ton­al Gas Ccom­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NGC) against rush­ing ac­tiv­i­ty at this coun­try's liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) plants in a bid to cap­i­talise on high­er LNG prices in the wake of the US-Is­rael at­tacks on Iran.

At the Op­po­si­tion news con­fer­ence on Tues­day, Young ac­knowl­edged that fol­low­ing mili­tiary strikes on QatarEn­er­gy's fa­cil­i­ties in Ras Laf­fan and Me­saieed In­dus­tri­al Cities, that com­pa­ny stopped LNG pro­duc­tion. QatarEn­er­gy is one of the world's largest pro­duc­ers of LNG.

Young said in the wake of that news, the NGC chair­man Ger­ald Ramdeen has held meet­ings with At­lantic rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

The for­mer min­is­ter warned that two LNG trains are cur­rent­ly un­der­go­ing re­pairs and main­te­nance that is nec­es­sary and any move that dis­rupts that may hurt the coun­try in the long term.

"Right now, one of the trains at At­lantic LNG is down, as I un­der­stand it, for emer­gency re­pairs that were not planned. And then there is a planned turn­around and re­pairs and main­te­nance to be done to an­oth­er train. These things can­not be put off," said Young, ""You can­not play with the safe­ty of these plants that re­quire the main­te­nance that has been sched­uled. Any off­set of that can have dis­as­trous con­se­quences to At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ties."

Young said the coun­try is still well po­si­tioned to re­ceive a wind­fall from the on­go­ing con­flict as a re­sult of the deal, which was rene­go­ti­at­ed with Shell and BP con­cern­ing the LNG plant more than two years ago.

He said, "But for­tu­nate­ly, the good news for us is that the re­struc­tur­ing done, and cul­mi­nat­ing in De­cem­ber 2023 is go­ing to have di­rect ben­e­fits, both on the gas prices, as I've just in­di­cat­ed, as well as our po­si­tion­ing on car­gos. But it must not be done at the ex­pense and the safe­ty of this plant."

How­ev­er, he was skep­ti­cal about the re­turns from down­stream in­dus­tries as a re­sult of gov­ern­ment poli­cies which he ar­gued may im­pact po­ten­tial re­turns.

On Mon­day, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal and NGC ex­ec­u­tives met with ex­ec­u­tives from Nu­trien.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the Min­istry, that meet­ing cen­tred around Gov­ern­ment’s pol­i­cy re­gard­ing the im­por­tance of the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor and fu­ture busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties in­volv­ing the NGC and Nu­trien.

Nu­trien tem­porar­i­ly shut down op­er­a­tions in Oc­to­ber last year.

Young said with re­gard to that meet­ing, '"For­tu­nate­ly, I see the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy hus­tled and had a meet­ing with Nu­trien yes­ter­day (Mon­day), which, by the way, is still shut down. So we have lost hun­dreds of mil­lions of US dol­lars from this fa­cil­i­ty be­ing shut down, an ad­vanced, so­phis­ti­cat­ed fa­cil­i­ty that pro­duces ni­trate and am­mo­nia be­ing shut down now for months."

A mes­sage was sent to En­er­gy Min­is­ter Mooni­lal con­cern­ing the out­come of Mon­day's meet­ing, but no re­sponse was re­ceived up to pub­li­ca­tion.