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Over the past few years, there has been a great deal of dis­course in Trinidad & To­ba­go about the op­por­tu­ni­ties to im­port nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela to Trinidad for pro­cess­ing in­to petro­chem­i­cals or LNG and re-ex­port­ing the fi­nal prod­ucts to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets. This con­tin­ues to be a ma­jor area of in­ter­est and es­pe­cial­ly with the Drag­on gas field.

While the cur­rent fo­cus is on gas, there was a time in the past when T&T im­port­ed sub­stan­tial vol­umes of crude oil from Venezuela, pri­mar­i­ly as feed­stock for the now moth­balled Point-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.

In the year 2000, T&T im­port­ed over 18 mil­lion bar­rels of crude from Venezuela, which at the time rep­re­sent­ed over half of T&T’s im­port­ed crude. This is equiv­a­lent to just over 50,000 bar­rels per day rough­ly equal to the cur­rent do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion of T&T.