Trinidad and Tobago is just a damn lazy nation. After 50 years of independence does T&T produce anything? Is there any one thing that T&T is exceptionally good at? NO. T&T is mediocre in all that it does. It is a nation that likes to claim it has everything but does just about everything badly.

It has everything it needs to sustain itself but prefers to sell off its natural assets to countries that are not lazy to buy the end products they produce. The top asset that every nation wishes to have is energy security which T&T has but day in, day out it sells off its energy security off cheaply.

Stupid T&T. It takes energy to do all the other stuff. Why try so hard to sell off your raw energy? T&T's neighbours, the United States, is not wastefully selling off its native reserves of energy. It understands the implications of reserving for the long haul.

T&T can't seem to stop itself from pitching up one energy refinery after another. After just a century, T&T is already oil poor. Deeper and farther out to sea the nation has to look for scarce oil. How long before the same is said of T&T's natural gas reserves?

The 2011 Ryder Scott Report audit of Trinidad and Tobago's natural gas reserves recorded a decrease in proven gas reserves and estimated they would last nine more years. T&T's total proven gas reserves stood at 13,460 trillion cubic feet (tcf) at December 31, 2010 compared to 19,674 tcf in 2000. Those figures represent a 31.58 per cent depletion in gas reserves in ten years, a 1000th of a blink of an eye for the life of a nation. What will T&T's energy position be when gas stock go the way of T&T's once bountiful and easily accessible oil stock? T&T is on the steady path toward compounding its lack of food security with lack of energy security.

B Joseph

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