Energy Minister Roodal Moonilal, speaking at news conference on Thursday (Photo:CMC)
GEORGETOWN, Guyana (CMC) — Trinidad and Tobago’s Energy Minister Dr Roodal Moonilal says Guyana is helping the oil-rich twin island republic secure possible sources of funding to help revive the long-shuttered Petrotrin refinery in south Trinidad.
“The Guyanese government has been very helpful in setting up several meetings with entities — both banking and refining companies — to explore the possibility of partnering with the government of Trinidad and Tobago to restart the refinery,” Moonilal said.
In January, the Trinidad and Tobago government said it is exploring the possibility of regional and international partners being involved in the restart of the state-owned oil refinery that was shut down in 2018 when the former government said the cost of upgrading the refinery would have loaded the company with an unsustainable debt burden estimated at TT$12 billion (One TT dollar=US$0.16 cents) of which TT$5.780 billion is due in August 2019.
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said her government would restart the state-owned oil refinery and that the interim report of the refinery restart committee was clear and “restarting the Guaracara Refinery is technically, commercially and financially viable even after seven years of closure and neglect”.
Moonilal, who was participating in the fifth Guyana Energy Conference that ended this weekend, said if a deal could be struck by mid-year or third quarter, he was optimistic that work on the refinery could begin during the last quarter of 2026
He said that Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali put him in contact with Arab representatives and local bankers to discuss financing for the Petrotrin refinery. Moonilal said a member of his delegation, who is a senior financial analyst and banker, had since been in touch with the banking community.
“We have estimated that for a short-term quick restart could be in the vicinity of US$50 million. For long-term, the full range of products, to go back to where we were as a supplier of products to Caricom would be about U$200 million and we are working now with several entities that we have met here to see how we can best we can garner the financing,” he said.
The energy minister said the funds would be used to fix technical and design aspects of the refinery, and for health and safety.
Moonilal said that while Trinidad and Tobago has the human resource capacity to operate the refinery, the country might need one sub-contractor from the United States along with experts from Shell and British Petroleum (BP), as well as partnerships from outside the Caribbean to establish linkages to markets and technologies.
Asked whether Trinidad and Tobago planned to source Guyana’s light sweet crude to process given the fact that Petrotrin was built to refine heavy oil, he said that no longer mattered because of scientific improvements in the industry.
“That distinction with heavy and light crude is becoming less and less significant because now they have the technologies and the chemistry and so on to convert one to the other so it’s really an issue of the 80s, 90s and so on to talk heavy, light crude. The technology is there now to convert and use into the refineries,” he said.