IF the Dr Keith Rowley-led Government is still holding on to the pipe dream that the Dragon gas plan will become operational, let me say with the utmost certainty, in my humble opinion, that the dragon flew away and the deal seems just dead.
Amidst the many scandals which revolve around the Paria Fuel Trading Company, and the sobering reality of it as well, the whole energy outlook for T&T is depressing. On February 25, 2022, five divers working for Paria Trading Company Limited, were sucked into the 36-inch oil pipeline on which they were working. Four didn’t make it back up alive. The cause of the accident was allegedly attributed to a powerful vacuum effect presumably caused by the removal of a flange attached to the vertical section of the U-shaped conduit. To date, we are still awaiting the outcome of the Commission of Enquiry (CoE) on this and wondering if they ever got pen, paper and wifi to conduct their inquiry. Did the government ever provide resources for them to start?
The current government has not handled this situation properly nor many others in the energy sector and there is an enormous perception of suspicion and lack of confidence in the way the whole state of affairs of the death of the divers was handled thus far, far less the still outstanding sale of Petrotrin and what is generally going on in the energy sector and information being released in the public domain.
It seems surreal, freakish and bizarre the number of issues we have in our energy industry. Is this the norm of our energy sector now? The government has not engendered confidence in this industry at all, from the shutting down of Petrotrin to the opening up of the new companies which have had one issue after another. The investigatory stage of the CoE has gotten off to a rocky start where we hope the evidence was kept properly and assembled with respect to the relevant matter to the terms of reference, which will allow us to finally know what happened.
At this point, the CoE is therefore the lifeblood of the inquiry. If this is not handled properly it would not be effective in order to get proper information on what occurred. Therefore the commission will be unable to discharge its full responsibility to uncover facts, evaluate the facts and be able to perform its duties properly.
The deaths of the four divers have been shrouded in secrecy and seemingly incompetence. How can we hope to be a major player in the energy landscape of our future with blunder after blunder taking place? It’s too many now. The current Government is unable to get it right and I say it’s high time that enough is enough, time to get a competent Government in place to handle our energy sector.
Neil Gosine is an insurance executive. He is also the treasurer of the UNC and a former Chairman of the National Petroleum Marketing Company of Trinidad and Tobago. He holds a Master’s in Business Administration MBA, BSC in Mathematics and a BA in Administrative Studies. The views and comments expressed in this column are not necessarily those of AZP News, a Division of Complete Image Limited.
