IN MANY OF his recent public statements, including at the launch of the major grid-scale solar project, the restructuring of Atlantic and the opening of bids for the onshore bid round, the Minister of Energy, the Honourable Stuart Young, has made impassioned pleas for the pace of delivery to be accelerated. The need to speed up the pace of approvals was the first point in the Energy Chamber’s six-point plan for the future of the gas industry released in June 2022. And past Minister of Energy, Kevin Ramnarine, has also made a similar point in a recent media interview. So, this is one point on which everybody seems to be aligned.
Given that this is an objective to which everyone seems to be committed, why is it proving difficult to achieve? One reason might be the sheer number of different agencies and Ministries involved in the approval process. The Energy Chambercommissioned study on the approval process of upstream gas projects, released in 2020, showed that there were numerous separate approvals needed across numerous different agencies in numerous different Ministries. As many of the decisions have to be taken in series, rather than with processes working in parallel, people working in a specific agency may not appreciate how a small delay from them can have a cumulative impact and cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Speeding up the approval process will involve detailed process improvement work in all of the agencies. The devil is in the detail. The robustness of the approval process must not be compromised while this effort to shorten timeframes takes place. It is about making sure that the right approval process is conducted quickly, not about removing necessary oversight and protection for the environment and for people.
Improving the process is also about getting alignment between various agencies. It is important that agencies outside of the Ministry of Energy also understand how their decision-making (or lack thereof) has impacts on the energy sector. Delays mean lost value to the people of Trinidad and Tobago, and everyone involved in all steps of any approval process need to understand that delaying a decision has a serious cost to the country (not just a cost to the multinational operator company).
While the project conducted in 2020 by the Energy Chamber identified the process to approve major upstream offshore gas developments, there is also a need to speed up investments in new renewable energy and other decarbonisation projects. The first major grid scale solar project needed two years of negotiations post the announcement of the winning tender, from the bp, Shell, Lightsource consortium. As the Minister of Energy made clear, that is just too slow, and this delay will have cost Trinidad and Tobago hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export earnings, with lots of natural gas having to be sold to electricity generation rather than coming from solar, if the original timelines had been met.
At this year’s Energy Conference Kenesjay Green and the NewGen project will be hosting a workshop to investigate the approval process for new decarbonisation projects. The plan is that the output of that workshop will be used to map out improvements that can be made to speed up the process.
The Energy Chamber remains committed to working with all stakeholders to improve and speed up the approval process. We have a complex future to navigate but we need to be able to do that navigation while moving at top-speed. If we do not, we could find ourselves stranded and counting the costs.