(Trinidad Guardian) Trinidad and Tobago, the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas to the US, said exports to that country have fallen “sharply” because of rising US shale gas production. The share of Trinidad and Tobago’s LNG exports accounted for by the US has plunged to 25 per cent, from 75 per cent three years ago, Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine said today in an interview in Doha, Qatar. The US is the largest single destination for the Caribbean producer’s exports, he said. Trinidad and Tobago exports 15 million metric tonnes of the fuel a year and will continue to ship this amount even if the US reduces imports, he said. The country is shifting some of the supplies previously sent to the US to markets in South America, mainly Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and also to Asia, Ramnarine said. “There is strong demand from Asia, especially Japan, and we are getting better prices there too,” he said.
Japan increased its imports of LNG after an earthquake in March knocked out nuclear power stations in the country, Ramnarine said. “The LNG market is very robust at the moment,” he said. The nation exports 22 percent of its output to Asia, he said. The country has four LNG production lines and is considering building a small-scale plant to ship the fuel to smaller Caribbean Islands as demand in those nations is rising. T&T’s LNG has come to represent one-third of the Dominican Republic’s total energy matrix and is increasingly used in the transport sector, according to a report by Jeremy Martin, the director of the Energy Programme at the Institute of the Americas at the University of California in San Diego, published on Friday in the Latin America Business Chronicle.
But he pointed out that T&T’s LNG faces competition in the north Caribbean country as US energy supplier, Cheniere Energy signed an MOU in February to send LNG from the US to the Dominican Republic. Cheniere earlier last month signed an LNG purchase agreement with BG, the second largest shareholder in Atlantic, the four-train liquified natural gas producer in Point Fortin.