For most of the 20th century, the answer to Trinidad and Tobago's economic questions was simple: drill deeper. The Pitch Lake at La Brea — the world's largest natural deposit of asphalt — hinted at the petroleum wealth beneath the island's surface, wealth that would be systematically extracted from the 1910s onward and would come to underpin almost everything about the country's modern economy: its government revenues, its welfare systems, its infrastructure, its identity.
By the early 21st century, T&T had become one of the Western Hemisphere's most significant energy exporters, with a natural gas sector that had made the country the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per capita. The petrochemical industries built around that gas had created thousands of high-skilled jobs and generated the foreign exchange that funded the country's social programmes.
The Declining Reserves Problem
The warning signs have been visible for years. Oil production has been in secular decline since the 1970s. Mature gas fields are producing less. New exploration has not delivered the game-changing discoveries that the country needs. The fiscal pressure created by declining hydrocarbon revenues has forced successive governments to run deficits, draw down the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund (essentially the country's savings account), and make politically difficult decisions about subsidies and public sector wages.
The Energy Transition Opportunity
Natural gas occupies an ambiguous position in the global energy transition. As a lower-carbon alternative to coal and oil, it has been positioned by the industry as a "bridge fuel" to a renewables-dominated future — a claim that environmental advocates dispute. For T&T, which has significant remaining gas reserves, this ambiguity creates both opportunity and risk. The opportunity: to sell gas to markets moving away from coal while developing the renewable energy capacity that will eventually replace it. The risk: that the energy transition moves faster than expected, stranding assets and leaving T&T with an economy built on fuel that nobody wants.
