Business View Caribbean - January 2015 71
GOVERNMENT & PUBLIC SECTORS
sustainability. There’s the sustainable part in making
sure our country maintains its hydrocarbons industry
for as long as possible. That is an issue around poten-
tial investment – making sure we continue to attract
investment into the country. But then there’s a sort of
bigger question about sustainability – how do we find
our way in a post-hydrocarbons world, which will come
at some stage. It’s still a long ways off, but something
we need to transition towards, and the Energy Cham-
ber’s emphasis has been on developing our technical
skills and the capacity of our domestic service indus-
try – the companies who serve the oil and gas indus-
try - to be able to work all around the world. And, also,
not just to work in the oil and gas industry, but to de-
velop their skills in allied sectors. The same skills you
need for drilling oil wells are the same skills you need
for drilling geothermal wells. The skills you need for
insulating a petrochemical facility can easily be trans-
ferred into other facilities wanting to reduce energy
consumption. There’s a lot of transferability for engi-
neering skills that you can be develop. We have had a
major emphasis on developing our service industry to
make sure they’re working at the highest international
standards, so that they are able to compete globally.
BUSINESS VIEW: So that’s not a terrifying thought
that the hydrocarbons industry is going to come to a
grinding halt one day, with people that have training
that no longer translates to anything else?
DRIVER:
Well, it’s not a day that we would welcome,
but it’s a day that we have to plan towards. But that’s
a great area to be working in and it’s a great portion of
what we’re working on in the Energy Chamber. We’re
working very actively on those issues. We’ve spent a
lot of time building the capacity of our service compa-
nies, so the country can move from a position where
it’s exporting commodities – at the moment we export
basically 10 energy related commodities that account
for 90 percent of our exports -0to where service ex-
ports take up a much bigger portion of our overall
exports. That’s what we’re working towards – having
competitive local service companies.
BUSINESS VIEW: Do you think you’re making the
right amount of progress toward that day, whenever
it does arrive?
DRIVER:
I think we’re making good progress. You al-
ways want to do things faster, but it’s hard work. We
have 329 companies in Trinidad, who we’ve certified
their health in-sector management systems as safe to
work. This is a very, very high standard, which we de-
veloped in the country, but it would meet all interna-
tional standards, including the standards of all of the
operators of the oil and gas industry. And having 329
companies in the country who meet that requirement
means that they have the ability to work internation-
ally. So we are making progress, but we have to keep
making progress.
BUSINESS VIEW: Can you talk about the role of the
energy chamber across a variety of industries – con-
struction, environmental – talk about the work you
do aside from just energy itself?
DRIVER:
We concentrate on the energy sector, but we
see the spinoffs from that into other sectors, so the ex-
ample I gave there about safety, there’s been spinoffs
from the development of safety culture in the oil and
gas industry to other sectors in the country. So you’ll
see a lot more concern about safe work practices in
the civil construction industry in the country than you
would see in the rest of the Caribbean. The other sort
of spinoffs from the industry would just be in terms
of things like information technology – the industry
demands very high standards in those types of sec-
tors, so that encourages other allied services around
the energy sector to also increase their standards.
We concentrate on the energy sector. There are other
