Energy stakeholders welcome refinery restart plan

The Gov­ern­ment’s plan to restart the Petrotrin re­fin­ery at Pointe-a-Pierre has drawn sup­port from in­dus­try stake­hold­ers, but for­mer En­er­gy min­is­ter Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan is ques­tion­ing the cost of the pro­posed restart, the avail­abil­i­ty of crude oil and ac­cess to ex­port mar­kets.

Dur­ing yes­ter­day’s 2027 Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo an­nounced that the Gov­ern­ment was eval­u­at­ing pro­pos­als from a short­list of lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors for a phased restart of the Guaracara Re­fin­ery.

“We will restart the re­fin­ery,” Tan­coo de­clared, de­scrib­ing the fa­cil­i­ty as more than a dor­mant in­dus­tri­al as­set, but a crit­i­cal part of na­tion­al fu­el se­cu­ri­ty and the eco­nom­ic sur­vival of com­mu­ni­ties that de­pend­ed on its op­er­a­tions.