PM: Favourable terms for Trinidad & Tobago in energy deals

(Trinidad Guardian) Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has walked away from his two-week long trip to the US, Nether­lands and the UK with favourable terms for the coun­try’s en­er­gy sec­tor.

This is ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from his of­fice. He met with Shell in The Hague, Nether­lands, BP in Lon­don and EOG Re­sources and BHP in Hous­ton, Unit­ed States.

Ac­cord­ing to his re­lease, Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley said that over one year, the Gov­ern­ment’s em­pow­ered ne­go­ti­a­tion team had suc­cess­ful­ly ne­go­ti­at­ed a com­plex deal with the two ma­jor en­er­gy play­ers, Shell and BP.

“The par­ties went in­to the ne­go­ti­a­tions with some­thing of val­ue and found a way for­ward that gives us all the eq­ui­table re­turns that we are en­ti­tled to…the par­ties re­newed their com­mit­ment to the con­tin­u­a­tion of ne­go­ti­a­tions be­tween the em­pow­ered ne­go­ti­a­tion teams to move now to phase two of the ne­go­ti­a­tions which will be fo­cused on the fu­ture of At­lantic LNG and the re­struc­tur­ing of same.”

Dur­ing his meet­ing with Shell at their head­quar­ters in The Hague, the par­ties reached agree­ment on a num­ber of items. These in­clud­ed the set­tle­ment of out­stand­ing lega­cy claims be­tween the par­ties, ex­ten­sions of var­i­ous Pro­duc­tion Shar­ing Con­tracts and an agree­ment on an en­hanced rev­enue for the gov­ern­ment based on an eq­ui­table share of rev­enue be­tween both par­ties, with an in­creased Gov­ern­ment take.

Their meet­ing al­so looked at oth­er as­pects of Shell’s busi­ness which, Row­ley said, “would un­lock con­tin­ued de­vel­op­ment of its growth agen­da in Trinidad and To­ba­go that would al­so ben­e­fit the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

The Prime Min­is­ter dubbed the agree­ment made be­tween T&T’s Gov­ern­ment and Shell last week as his­toric.

He said, “it sig­ni­fies an abil­i­ty by us to sit at the ta­ble and via mu­tu­al re­spect come to an agree­ment in a very com­plex en­vi­ron­ment to the ben­e­fit of the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

He thanked both BP and Shell for their com­mit­ment and open­ness to ne­go­ti­at­ing with T&T.