Barbados seeks TT oil expertise
The Bajans produce approximately 1,000 barrels of oil daily and this is refine at Pointe-a-Pierre. However, some citizens see a further foray into the oil industry leading to corruption and pollution of the environment.
Three weeks ago, an ad appeared in a Trinidad newspaper seeking staff with experience in the oilfields and petroleum exploration. Nothing strange, you say, after all Trinidad is the original Caribbean oil island, but that is set to change if the neighbors to the North have their way.
The ad was placed by the Barbados National Oil Company (BNOC), and signals that country’s latest effort to embark on yet another attempt to search for petroleum in commercial quantities.
Few Trinidadians are aware that over the years, Barbados has been producing a small quantity of petroleum, and at one point there was even a refinery on the tiny island. Trinidad and Tobago expertise has been involved in Barbados’ oil production. Drilling contractors, tool pushers, drillers, petroleum engineers and other specialists have been involved in the Bajan little oil adventure in an area known as Woodbourne.
Wikipedia, the on-line encycopedia, lists the Barbados oil industry as that country’s “other significant industrial employer, apart from manufacturing,” but the article on that country’s economy notes that oil has never been produced in commercial quantities, and the island’s small oil refinery was closed in 1998 when refining was moved to Trinidad and Tobago “where labour and other costs are cheaper.”
This might have hurt the pride of some Bajans. When one considers that as late as last year, Barbados and TT were embroiled in a spat over maritime boundaries, with Barbados claiming maritime territory that many believe would have given them a distinct advantage in their quest for exploration of possible oil deposits offshore.
It seems also that oil, available in commercial quantities in Trinidad for more than a century, is a source of some rivalry between this country and other Caribbean territories. Some readers might remember Jamaica’s foray into offshore oil exploration hundreds off miles off that country’s South Coast: The exploratory well turned up only mud, and was eventually abandoned.
In Barbados, the picture is a little more promising, but not great: Barbados produced 1,000 bbl/d of oil in 2003 ( a drop in the bucket of global output) and oil production has been declining since 2001 despite the best efforts by BNOC.
With no refining capacity, the oil is refined in Trinidad, and then returned to Barbados for domestic use. Barbados also produces a limited amount of natural gas, and currently meets domestic natural gas demand, but expected increases in that demand means that Barbados will eventually be forced to import natural gas or find alternatives for power generation, households and the tourist industry.
This situation was enough to lead the Government’s then Energy and Environment Minister Elizabeth Thompson to announce in late 2006, that a British company was preparing blocks to be offered for public tender to international oil companies by the end of the first quarter of 2007.
Minister Thompson said then, that exploratory offshore wells drilled by U.S. oil company Conoco five years earlier were promising.
“We have had a number of visits and inquiries from oil moguls, big, small and aspiring and we have been able to get a feel for the level of (interest) which exists on the part of these companies to get into our oil industry because the seismic data yielded by Conoco looks so promising,” she said.
But on an island where tourism is king, rivalling even the mighty sugar industry, thinking citizens worry less about the need for their country to compete with the sharks in the global oil industry, and more about maintaining the pristine environment necessary for their beloved tourists to continue coming and pouring money into the Bajan economy.
Comments posted by citizens on ‘Barbados Free Press,’ a local news website, reveal that the island’s citizens are excited but divided over the prospect of their small island nation becoming another Caribbean oil island.
An article on the site listed the concerns of the island’s environmentalists, and even questioned the Government’s real intentions in a thinly veiled accusation that their elected representatives are lining themselves up for big payouts by the multinational oil companies: “How much will the oil companies pay government officials in secret bribes, “facilitation payments” or “consulting fees” that are neither illegal nor discoverable in the absence of transparency and conflict of interest laws?” the writer asked.
He or she also reminded fellow Bajans that while oil production brought “big money,” it also brought with it “big environmental risks,” and opportunities for corruption: “Barbados has no environmental laws that set any sort of standard for this project or any other potentially polluting activities by a corporation. “Barbados has not been able to force Shell Oil to clean up or pay for pipeline spills back in 1994.”
The writer also noted that the Barbados Government “has deliberately failed to introduce any laws requiring transparency in the tendering process or otherwise enabling citizens to hold public officials accountable. As a matter of fact, there are no laws in Barbados that prevent a public official from profiting through selling influence or government contracts.”
The article resulted in a rash of replies posted on the site by readers, with comments for and against the expansion of the energy industry in Barbados.
Some expressed doubt that the efforts to expand oil production would pay off: “We have been getting these offshore oil ‘messages’ for decades now, and it is yet to come to pass,” one post said.
Most of the posts expressed concerns for the environment: “Petroleum deposits on the Barbados Ridge will be found either North or South of the island, many miles out, where pollution will be someone else’s problem,” one post said optimistically.
Another said: “What if they find clean burning natural gas that can bring a ton-load of jobs to Bajans for the next 50-100 years? “Who vex then?
“Rules should be in place, but not based on knee-jerk reaction, speculation or purely on the political flavour of the day. Plan ahead tentatively, but wait for some facts to guide final decisions.”
But others worried more about what the Bajan energy industry would do to the local environment. Readers spoke about drillships, “the most expensive of all drilling technologies,” and “big humming, vibrating oil rig machines out in the Caribbean seas,” drilling, polluting beaches, and chasing away tourists as the industry had done in nearby Trinidad.
One post summed it up neatly. In a statement that speaks volumes about the rivalries between themselves and their rich neighbours to the South, Barbados’ quest for oil was described as “another top class way to scare off more of the migrating Flying Fish” to the benefit of Tobago fisher-folk, who now produce more of the delicacy than their Bajan counterparts.