Trinidad & Tobago's role in US energy security

29th March 2026

Trinidad & Tobago plays a small, often overlooked, but nevertheless crucial, role in the energy security of the United States. At critical and stressful times for the US energy system, including winter cold snaps and summer heat waves, liquified natural gas from the Atlantic facility in Trinidad is needed to keep people in New England either warm or cool.  During these times, LNG cargoes from Trinidad are imported into the Everett LNG facility in Boston to supplement the gas supplied to the northeast of the USA by pipelines. 

Speaking at CERA Week, the US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, gave a definition of energy security that emphasised the ability of the nation to provide the energy needed by all citizens at all times, even when the energy system was under strain due to extreme weather conditions. On a net basis and as the world’s biggest oil producer and biggest exporter of LNG, the United States clearly provides more total energy than it consumes. However, there are bottlenecks in the US energy system which mean that at high demand times particular geographical areas may face shortfalls from domestic sources. This is when Trinidad steps in.

Natural gas pipeline capacity to move gas from producing areas, like the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, to the northeast has not expanded sufficiently to meet demand, due mainly to local environmental opposition (though there are active plans to fix this through the construction of the Constitution pipeline).  Given this, moving LNG from the export facilities on the US Gulf coast to Boston by tanker would seem like an obvious solution. However, this is constrained by the Jones Act, which prevents marine transport between US ports unless the vessel is US flagged; and there are almost no US flagged LNG tankers.   The next closest LNG export facility to Boston is Trinidad, about 4 to 6 days sailing (compared to at least 15 days from Nigeria). 

When Atlantic was first built, almost all of the LNG from Trinidad was exported to the USA and we played a big role in their overall energy security.  Times are different now and only a tiny percent of our LNG goes to the USA, but that tiny percent is crucial to US energy security as defined by Secretary Wright. 

At peak gas demand times, like in the intense winter storms that hit the northeast in January and February 2026, Trinidad plays a crucial role in US energy security. This should factor in our diplomatic engagements with the US, not least in discussions about access to the huge, untapped gas reserves in Venezuela and how these could be processed through Atlantic to underpin US energy security. 

Sometimes Trinidad is important to its allies in ways that the country does not always seem to fully appreciate.