T&T Oil Production Falls By 11%

• Trinidad and Tobago's (T&T’s) oil production saw a decline of 11% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, the latest statistics from the Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries show.
• For the first three months of 2024, the country's average production was 49,879 barrels of oil per day (bo/d) compared to 56,292 (bo/d) for the same three-month period in 2023, a decline of 6,413 bo/d or 11.3%, the Ministry's energy bulletin showed.
• Finance Minister Colm Imbert recently told the country in an affidavit that oil and gas production for the first six months of fiscal 2024 has been 15% and 5%, respectively, below the volumes originally expected for 2024.
• In addition, the prices of the commodities have also been lower than the Finance Minister had hoped, leading to a budgetary shortfall of more than $9Bn.
• Purchasing drugs and equipment for public hospitals, paying for tertiary education for students, to senior citizen grants, come from the money earned from the production and sale of oil, gas, and its derivatives.
• Given this, the continued decline in T&T’s oil industry calls for greater investments in T&T’s non-oil economic segments in order to diversify the sovereign’s economy. This, coupled with measures to improve the current state of the oil industry could allow the government to see greater revenues once realised.

(Sources: Trinidad Express Newspaper & NCBCM Research)