Last week's convulsions at Petrotrin brought to the fore the urgent need for a thorough examination of the state-owned oil giant.

Except for when there are rumblings at the company's refinery that invariably trigger panic at the country's gas pumps, as happened over the past week, most citizens pay little attention to its operations.

Truth be told, Petrotrin is plagued with huge problems that, if they are not arrested soon, could likely turn into a crisis.

The latest issue at hand last week involved negotiations for a new industrial agreement between the company and the workers' representative union, the Oilfields Workers' Trade Unino (OWTU).

The union's demand stood at a 75 per cent increase for the period 2008-2011.

Petrotrin's offered five per cent, although it claimed that proposed adjustments to its employees' COLA and other allowances would take the company's offer to over 21 per cent.

The company and the OWTU eventually setlled last Friday at nine per cent.

Both parties knew that strike action would impact negatively on the national economy which is already in a precarious position.

Last year the company reportedly made a profit of just over $2 billion following a net loss of $133 million the previous year.

In a paid advertisement, Petrotrin said its annual wages and salaries bill was $1.9 billion, 50 per cent of operating costs.

The industry standard, it says, is 35 per cent.

Even as a settlement came last week after the confrontation, the question that remains unanswered today is, whither Petrotrin?

By its sheer size, and because of the critical sector it operates in, the nation needs to know where the company is heading.

In 2011, the company (with wholly owned subsidiary Trinmar) produced an average of 50,000 barrels of oil a day (bopd) out of an overall national average of 91,914 bopd. It owns or controls under licence 628,000 acres of land, and a marine area amounting to two million acres. It operates 2,037 oil wells on land, with Trinmar operating another 281 marine wells. In 2010, its assets were valued at $33 billion, with revenue that year being $25.9 billion.

Petrotrin also owns and operates the biggest oil refinery in the Caribbean, which, in 2011, processed 50 million barrels of oil into eight products, all of them critical to the nation's economy. Indeed, Petrotrin is one of the two biggest corporate contributors to government's revenues, the other being the National Gas Company. Put another way, it's like an industrial elephant.

But all is not well at the behemoth—and industrial strife may be the least of its problems. Its gasoline optimisation programme (GOP), which began back in 2005, and which is crucial to the refinery's modernisation, has been mired in controversy. What started out as a US$300 million project to upgrade or build four onsite plants and offsite infrastructure, has experienced cost overruns to the tune of US$1 billion.

Some months ago, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar announced that Cabinet had ordered a forensic audit of the GOP and other matters relating to the oil giant.

There has been no update on the status of that audit. Recently, OWTU president Ancel Roget alleged that several plants on the refinery have been shut down, presumably for maintenance. Are any of the GOP units up and running? We don't know.

Roget also spoke about what he described as moves afoot to privatise Trinmar, the company's lucrative oil production subsidiary.

But Trinmar can be likened to the "crown jewel" of Petrotrin's assets.

Why would the company want to divest it?

Petrotrin is too important to the economy and the country for its operations – and decisions like divestment – to remain as boardroom or Cabinet secrets.

Government and the board must come clean on where they plan to take this vital national asset.