Venezuela gas exports to T&T

21st May 2026

In my final CEO’s column in the Energy Chamber’s Energy Now newspaper, published in January 2026, I likened the on-again, off-again story of the Dragon gas field to a daytime soap opera. Every time it seemed like the plot was moving in one direction, there would be a sudden twist, and everything would change once again. 

The latest Dragon plot twist took place in the Trinidad & Tobago Parliament on Wednesday 13th May 2026, and I must admit it took me completely by surprise. The Minister of Finance, Dave Tancoo, announced that the government was setting up a new committee to examine how it was going to tax natural gas being imported from Venezuela and processed in Trinidad. 

For many years now, I have been pointing out to anyone who would listen that while imported Venezuelan gas was important to keep our petrochemical and LNG industries in operation, it would not produce the government revenue that domestic gas provides. The biggest tax take in the gas value chain is at the wellhead, in the form of royalties, petroleum profit taxes or profit shares under production sharing contracts. This is the major source of revenue for the government of Trinidad & Tobago from our gas resources. With Venezuelan gas these taxes would of course be collected by the Venezuelan government: the gas resources being produced in Venezuela belong to the people of Venezuela, just like Trinidad & Tobago’s resources belong to the people of Trinidad & Tobago. 

I like to talk about imported gas when talking about any molecules moving across the maritime border, to make sure that this point is clear.  I wonder sometimes if the constant talk of “cross border gas” and “across the border gas” has created an impression that Trinidad has some sort of claim on the Venezuelan resources. 

My assumption was that the government of Trinidad & Tobago would satisfy itself with collecting what I hope will be significant profits from NGC for their involvement as a commercial investor in the gas fields in Venezuela and as the marketer of gas in Trinidad (collected as both corporation tax and dividends), as well as corporation taxes from the petrochemical plants and Atlantic.  It seems now that the government of Trinidad & Tobago wants to collect additional revenue from the imported gas in the form of import taxes or some sort of additional new taxes for transporting and processing imported gas. 

This has me concerned. Talk of new taxes at this stage will inevitably delay investment decisions from Shell and bp, or others who might have been thinking about Trinidad as an export market for pipeline gas they hope to produce in Venezuela. Companies will want to be sure that they understand the potential new taxes and their impacts on the economics of their investments.  Final investment decisions are going to be pushed back while this work remains outstanding. 

I have been around long enough to remember the deleterious impact that mere talk of imposing Supplemental Petroleum Tax (SPT) on natural gas had on upstream investment in 2008 and 2009. In many ways the root of our gas supply woes since 2014 can be traced to the fall off in drilling that the announcement precipitated.  I clearly remember a senior executive at one of the major upstream operators turning to me at the end of the presentation to the industry on the new proposed taxes and saying “well that’s the end for our investments in Trinidad”. Drilling collapsed from 3,409 rig days in 2007 to just 744 rig days in 2009: an almost 80% decline.  And the Trinidad government never collected a cent of SPT on natural gas. 

If the government draws out the discussions on new taxes on imported gas, I am afraid that we can say goodbye to Dragon gas in 2027. And in my most fearful moments I worry that we might be saying goodbye to Dragon gas at all. 

We need to be very careful with this assumption that the only route to monetise Venezuela gas lies through Trinidad’s infrastructure. Clearly in the short-term Trinidad offers a very attractive opportunity, but Venezuela will rightly want to develop demand for gas in Venezuela. A growing, revitalised and liberalised Venezuela (which I am sure we all want to see) will need more energy and natural gas will be an obvious source. There will be demands for electricity and demands for industry. And ENI and Repsol are already talking about the possibility of floating LNG for their massive Perla gas field in the west of the country. We must not assume that the offshore gas in the east of Venezuela must come to Trinidad. We need to position ourselves as an attractive option to monetise gas quickly, rather than assume we are the only game in town. 

I have noticed that recent statements by international operators working on gas projects in Venezuela unambiguously state that the gas developments must benefit the people of Venezuela. They are choosing their words carefully. 

If we want the soap opera of Dragon gas to have a happy ending for Trinidad & Tobago, we need to humble ourselves, move fast, and find win-win outcomes with our neighbours across the Gulf of Paria.