On the 20th March 1956 a group of thirty-five businessmen met at the offices of Industrial Agencies Ltd. (IAL), High Street, San Fernando. The meeting had been convened by Mr Robert “Bobby” Montano, the manager of Imperial Stores on High Street, in order to discuss the possibility of the establishment of an independent Chamber of Commerce, serving the needs of south Trinidad with a focus on promoting industrial development. After a fairly brief discussion, a unanimous decision was taken by the meeting to establish the South Trinidad Chamber of Commerce.
Seventy years later the Chamber, since renamed the Energy Chamber of Trinidad & Tobago, is still working to promote industrial development, focusing on the oil, gas, petrochemical and renewables sectors. The oil industry was always a central focus for the Chamber and the first person elected to serve as the President was P.E.T. (Pat) O’Connor, at that time General Manager of Antilles Petroleum Co and later of Premier Consolidated Oilfields. At that time he was one of the few locals in a senior management position in the oil industry.
Over the past seventy years the Energy Chamber has made an indelible impact on Trinidad & Tobago’s economy and society. The most obvious impact was the establishment of the Point Lisas industrial estate, something championed in particular by Bobby Montano.
The original interest in Point Lisas came from a desire from the southern business community to establish a deepwater port. The Chamber realised that if they were to see the development of a deepwater port, they needed to anchor the port with a major industrial estate. After extensive research, the location chosen by the Chamber was Point Lisas, due to the nature of the coastline and crucially the availability of large tracts of flat undeveloped land next to the coast. This landholding belonged to Caroni Ltd., at the time a private company owned by the British sugar giants, Tate & Lyle.
The Chamber engaged in extensive negotiations with Caroni Ltd. and the Government in order to put together the necessary combination of approvals, financial capital and land to develop the port and the industrial estate. This resulted in the creation of the Point Lisas Industrial Port Development Company (PLIPDECO) was eventually established exactly ten years after the founding of the South Trinidad Chamber.
The new company had four categories of shareholders; a group of South Trinidad Chamber Council members who held shares as trustees for the Chamber; Caroni Ltd. who were granted shares in exchange for the land that they made available, the Government of Trinidad & Tobago who were granted shares in return for funding a feasibility study for the port development; and members of the general public who subscribed to the offer. The original structure was designed to ensure that the Chamber retained control over PLIPDECO.
Over the next few years officials of the Chamber and PLIPDECO went on a series of road trips, mainly to the United States, to try to attract large heavy industrial plants to the estate. Despite some potential successes they encountered difficulty in attracting investors, mainly because of issues with Government red-tape.
In the early 1970s the Government, with increased revenue available due to high international oil prices, offered to take-over PLIPDECO and to play the role of facilitator and in some cases major investor into new heavy industrial plants. The Chamber reluctantly accepted this offer and control of PLIPDECO was handed over to the State. By 1976, Government investment into infrastructure at Point Lisas began to take off and the industrial estate and associated port facilities have never looked back. The deep water port as created, though not under the Chamber’s control.
While the establishment of Point Lisas is the most visible and significant achievement of the Energy Chamber, there have been many other notable impacts on the nation.
One of the most significant impacts on the oil industry was the establishment of the Lease-Out/Farm-Out (LO/FO) programmes for idle onshore oil industry assets in the late 1980s. This programme was born directly out of the annual Trinidad & Tobago Petroleum Conference (since renamed the Energy Conference) in the late 1980s. There LO/FO programme has led to the creation of many smaller independent oil companies and has over the years produced significant volumes of oil, as well as jobs, business opportunities and jobs in south Trinidad.
In addition to the development of Point Lisas and the LO/FO programme, the Energy Chamber frequently lobbied the Government on other oil and gas industry issues, such the fiscal and legal regime for the sector and the promotion of local content. There has always been a strong focus on promoting local service companies and ensuring that they were able to sell goods and services to the major operator companies, both upstream and downstream. The challenging of meeting stringent but varied operator company requirements led directly to the creation of the Safe to Work programme, as well as the creation of a uniform industry-wide basic safety training and certification programme for the contractor labour force.
While the energy sector has always been a focus for the Energy Chamber, during the 1980s and 1990s there was also significant work done on creating a new vision for the city of San Fernando. Many of the current redevelopment
plans for the city came out of the original visioning exercises conducted by the Chamber, though implementation has been very slow.
In the early 2000’s Chamber took a strategic decision to focus just on national energy sector issues, rather than issues around the development of south Trinidad. The South Trinidad Chamber effectively transitioned from having a geographical focus to have a sectoral focus and hence the change in name to the Energy Chamber. Nevertheless, many of the guiding principles established back in 1956 still hold true for the new sectoral focused Energy Chamber, in particular the emphasis on transformation and development, rather than protecting the status quo.