With a ribboned shovel in hand, Prime Minister Keith Lowry last month attended a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate Trinidad and Tobago’s first large-scale solar project, which is expected to generate electricity for 42,000 homes.
But if anyone thought the project represented the twilight of the island nation’s long embrace of fossil fuels, Lowry got them right.
“As long as there is an international market, we will continue to extract available hydrocarbons,” Lowry said as executives from BP and Shell looked on. “If you’re going to sell the last barrel of oil or the last molecule of gas, so be it.”
Trinidad and Tobago is known for its white sandy beaches, mountainous rainforests and steel pan drums. But its economy depends on oil and natural gas, not tourism.
It is one of the largest fossil fuel producers in the Western Hemisphere and has been drilled for over a century. The main highways on the main island are congested and lined with industrial warehouses. Oil has become part of the culture and is the theme of many calypso songs. Steel pan drums were also born from used oil barrel lids.
If Trinidad seems to be zig-zagging on climate change policy, it’s much more than that. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States are also building large-scale solar power plants while exploring new oil wells. Fossil fuel-rich developing countries (a group that includes Guyana, Nigeria, Namibia and Trinidad) are undercapitalized, with poor people dependent on cheap electricity and oil revenues for social programs. It argues that it cannot jump to renewable energy easily.
The response from President Biden and European leaders will not be easy. Developed countries are still producers and users of fossil fuels and have failed to contribute the $100 billion a year they pledged to the Green Fund for poor countries from 2020.
“The countries of the South are telling the countries of the North, ‘You are the ones who caused the climate problem. I’m saying,” said Anthony Paul. A former employee of the Ministry of Energy in Trinidad, he has consulted with governments and companies in several African countries.
Trinidad has a population of just 1.5 million, but has long put out more energy than its weight. It is the second largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the Western Hemisphere after the United States and one of the highest per capita incomes in the Caribbean. It is also a major producer of petrochemicals such as ammonia and methanol.
However, due to aging oil and gas fields, oil production has fallen from a peak of 230,000 barrels per day in 1978 to 58,000 barrels per day. The country’s only refinery closed four years ago. Gas production has fallen 40 percent since 2010, forcing the closure of one of four liquefied natural gas export terminals and three of its 18 petrochemical plants.
At the same time, the country is feeling the effects of climate change, with many rainy seasons and dry seasons resulting in reduced crop yields, rough seas afflicting fishermen, coastal roads and house is flooded.
“We have a big decision to make about whether to steer in a new direction,” said Leung Singh, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Energy Engineers Association. “If we don’t do it right, we will face economic ruin.”
Raleigh’s government, for now, wants to encourage energy companies to develop new offshore oilfields and double its use of fossil fuels.
The oil and gas business “is the foundation of our middle class,” said Ainka Granderson, an environmental scientist at the Caribbean Institute of Natural Resources, a research institute in the mainland city of San Juan. “Oil and gas were once the backbone of our country, but now they are our crutches.”
The crutch is becoming more and more unstable.
On a recent April afternoon, a tanker ship arrived at the Atlantic LNG terminal at Point Fortin to load cryogenic gas for the UK. “Trinidad helped us,” said Jean-André Celestine, the plant’s chief operating officer, with a smile.
However, as the country’s gas production is declining, the plant only fills one tanker every 66 hours these days, down from one every 48 hours four years ago.
“Securing gas supplies is an urgent matter,” said Atlantic LNG CEO Ronald Adams.
Oil companies have discovered several new small fields, but analysts still expect production to decline over the next few years.
The country’s gross domestic product fell by 20% from 2015 to 2021 due to declining energy export earnings. There has been a slight recovery over the past year due to higher oil and gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and new gas discoveries by Shell. .
But that alone won’t be enough to stem the decline in energy production and revenues, energy experts say.
To make up for the shortfall, the country is trying to reduce its domestic use of natural gas and make more natural gas available for export. That’s the main mission of the solar power plant that BP and Shell are building in Trinidad. To curb domestic gas demand, energy regulators are proposing higher electricity prices for residents and businesses. The proposal has faced fierce political opposition.
“Being an oil and gas producing country, people are enjoying cheap electricity prices from fossil fuels, so renewable energy efforts are always lagging behind,” said David Alexander, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Trinidad. said. Tobago.
Dr. Alexander and another professor suggest that carbon recovered from petrochemical plants on the island of Trinidad could be stored and used to offset most or all of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Leading the Atlas of Recovery mapping effort. .
There are other plans to keep Trinidad and Tobago away from gas and oil. Some entrepreneurs have argued that the country should become a major exporter of products made from renewable energy such as hydrogen, fertilizers and clean transportation fuels.
Domestic energy company Kenneth Jay Green is working on hydrogen production at the Point Lisus petrochemical complex. The company plans to use renewable energy and waste heat from power plants to separate hydrogen from water. “Trinidad is uniquely poised to start the energy transition dramatically,” said Philippe Julien, chairman of Kenneth Jay. “There’s a lot of potential and a lot of work to do.”
Kenneth Jay works with ammonia producer Yara Trinidad to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing gas with water in the production process. Yarra Trinidad hopes to finally be able to restart one of its three ammonia plants that have been dormant due to gas supply shortages.
The government supports these efforts, but remains focused on natural gas. “Gas will be around for decades, right?” Trinidad and Tobago’s Energy Minister Stuart Young said in an interview.
The country is looking to new offshore oilfields to boost gas production and exports. One of these is a manatee field adjacent to the Venezuelan border, which is being developed by Shell.
Just across the border is a medium sized shallow field called Dragon. Trinidad and Venezuela have been negotiating for five years how to produce and export dragon gas. Shell will operate the field, and a pipeline could connect the field to an export terminal in Trinidad and Tobago within three to four years.
But before that, Trinidad needs to reach an agreement with the Biden administration and the government of Venezuela that allows it to export natural gas from Venezuela’s Dragon field without violating US sanctions.
In January, the Biden administration gave the Trinidad island government two years of permission to do business with Venezuela, but only if Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government did not receive a cash payment. Trinidad and Tobago offered to pay for gasoline as food and medicine, but Maduro rejected the offer.
Another potential is the Calypso field off the coast of Tobago, which could be the country’s first deepwater gas field.
Australian company Woodside Energy is working with BP to develop Calypso. However, Calypso’s geology is complex. This gas field consists of pockets of unconnected gas, requiring multiple wells and high drilling costs.
“We’re looking at the concept and figuring out how to make it work for everyone,” said Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Woodside.
Analysts say Trinidad must act quickly or risk losing gas customers to other exporters such as the United States and Qatar, which are building newer and more efficient liquefied natural gas terminals. Stated.
That may be a tall order, and some long-serving Trinidadians in the oil and gas industry worry that little can be done to stop the decline of their industry.
Ronnie Beharry held various field positions before becoming manager of gas fields operated by Touchstone Exploration. Although he has only a high school education, he can afford to send his eldest daughter to college.
“We’re starting to be environmentally conscious, so I tell them to consider other options,” he said of his three children. “I don’t know where things are going. Sometimes I think this country has a backup plan, other times it doesn’t.”
