Moonilal hits back at Ralph Gonzales over “monopoly money” claim

Rad­hi­ca De Sil­va

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has slammed com­ments made by St Vin­cent’s Prime Min­is­ter Dr Ralph Gon­za­les, who com­pared Trinidad and To­ba­go’s cur­ren­cy to mo­nop­oly mon­ey.

Speak­ing at an en­er­gy sym­po­sium on Tues­day, Mooni­lal said Gon­za­les’ re­marks were un­help­ful and ac­cused him of fail­ing to speak out when T&T’s econ­o­my was be­ing mis­man­aged by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment.

Mooni­lal said, “Maybe Prime Min­is­ter Gon­za­les should have shared his wis­dom with his col­leagues who were re­spon­si­ble for the col­lapse of our econ­o­my and the short­age of for­eign ex­change.”

He said the gov­ern­ment is work­ing to re­build the econ­o­my and for­eign ex­change sup­ply by boost­ing oil and gas pro­duc­tion.

Among the new projects, he said oil pro­duc­tion has al­ready start­ed at the Men­to field and is ex­pect­ed to reach 8,200 bar­rels per day. An­oth­er project in the Pui field is ex­pect­ed to add near­ly 3,000 bar­rels a day by ear­ly next year.

He al­so point­ed to ris­ing pro­duc­tion in East Sol­da­do, and new oil and gas fields be­ing de­vel­oped over the next four years.

On the gas side, Mooni­lal ad­mit­ted there’s been a sharp drop in out­put over the past decade, but said that’s al­ready start­ing to change.

He said a new gas project came on­line in April and more are com­ing by 2027, in­clud­ing Shell’s Man­a­tee de­vel­op­ment, which is now ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er more gas than orig­i­nal­ly planned.

Mooni­lal said re­cent in­vest­ment in new fields shows that con­fi­dence in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s en­er­gy sec­tor is grow­ing again.