The Guaracara refinery restart: Will expectations be met?

The Gov­ern­ment has in­formed the pop­u­la­tion that the Guaracara Re­fin­ery will restart, promis­ing a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic boost and much-need­ed em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties. No one doubts that restart­ing the Guaracara Re­fin­ery is tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble. The crit­i­cal ques­tion is whether the re­fin­ery can be man­aged and op­er­at­ed safe­ly, re­li­ably, prof­itably, and sus­tain­ably over its 15- to 20-year in­vest­ment cy­cle across chang­ing gov­ern­ment ad­min­is­tra­tions—with­out shift­ing mas­sive fi­nan­cial risks on­to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s tax­pay­ers. This ar­ti­cle aims to stim­u­late con­ver­sa­tion and dis­cus­sion on this im­por­tant jour­ney the coun­try is about to em­bark on.

The foun­da­tion for mov­ing for­ward

Full coverageGovernment Advances Plan to Restart Pointe-à-Pierre Refinery in Trinidad13 reports

Follow

The Restart Com­mit­tee’s as­sump­tions and risks un­der­pin­ning its find­ings of tech­ni­cal, com­mer­cial, and fi­nan­cial vi­a­bil­i­ty form the foun­da­tion on which the gov­ern­ment is mov­ing for­ward. The Restart Com­mit­tee was led by for­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine and in­clud­ed for­mer Petrotrin vice pres­i­dent of fi­nance, Shari­ba Ali Ra­jah; for­mer vice pres­i­dent of re­tail and mar­ket­ing, Kelvin Har­nanan; for­mer re­fin­ery man­ag­er, Gow­tam Ma­haraj (now chair­man of the Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion and chair­man of the Guaracara Re­fin­ery Board); UWI lec­tur­er in en­gi­neer­ing/main­te­nance, Kishore Ja­groo; op­er­a­tions and process en­gi­neer, Leslie Chang; OW­TU branch pres­i­dent, Christo­pher Jack­man; elec­tri­cal sys­tems/for­mer OW­TU month­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Dan­ny Goolcha­ran; plan­ning, eco­nom­ics, sched­ul­ing, and com­mer­cial port ma­rine man­ag­er, Mar­garet De Sil­va Okan­do; En­er­gy Min­istry se­nior chem­i­cal en­gi­neer, Yashee Car­ring­ton; En­er­gy Min­istry chem­i­cal en­gi­neer, Anuskha Ben­ny-Sookoo; and port, ma­rine, and ship­ping ex­pert, Len Chan Chow.