ENERGY Minister Stuart Young has said the Government has been doing the hard work to ensure Trinidad and Tobago will benefit from the Dragon gas deal with Venezuela.

"We did what we had to do. We did not give up."

Young rejected claims by Opposition Senator Wade Mark that TT is in danger of losing a licence granted by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to close the deal if the US reintroduces sanctions against Venezuela unless it holds free elections next year.

Young spoke in debate on a private motion about the deal in the Senate on Tuesday

The US$1 billion deal was signed between TT and Venezuela in August 2018. Those involved included energy giant Shell, Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, and the National Gas Company (NGC).

The Dragon deal will see TT developing the field, which is estimated to produce approximately 150 million standard cubic feet of gas a day. The gas will be imported through a billion-dollar pipeline to the Hibiscus platform off the northwest coast of TT. The platform is jointly owned by the Government, NGC and Shell.

The deal was left in limbo after the US imposed sanctions on Venezuela in 2019.

On January 24, the Prime Minister announced that the US had lifted sanctions to allow TT to extract gas from Venezuela. This waiver came after almost four years of lobbying led by Dr Rowley and supported by other Caricom leaders.

Rowley said the waiver came with stipulations, one being a two-year licence with an optimistic view of an extension and priority given to Caribbean countries, except Cuba.

In October, OFAC offered an extension of the licence it issued to TT to access natural gas from the Dragon gas field and the ability to pay for that gas in different ways.

Young announced the extension of the licence to October 31, 2025 at a news conference on October 17.

He said the extension also allows Government to pay for gas from the field in “fiat currency, as well as US dollars, as well as (Venezuelan bolivares), as well as via humanitarian measures.”

Young said the OFAC licence is a full green light for the government.

He said there have been several virtual meetings with the Venezuelan government and PDVSA “as we now get into the granular level of detail for the pricing of the development of the gas from Dragon.

In his contribution, Young provided all these details along with a chronology of events since 2016, when the Government decided to pursue a cross-border arrangement with Venezuela to access gas from the Dragon field.

He reminded senators that one of the reasons to pursue this initiative was a decline in natural gas production, which began in 2011, and which the then UNC-led People's Partnership (PP) coalition government did nothing about.

When the PNM assumed office in 2015, Young said, it was faced "with a situation with what can you do in the short term to get additional gas when you are a mature (energy) province."

He claimed the PP had hoodwinked the public into believing this decline was due to maintenance issues by downstream energy c