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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 13:29 |
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad -- In 2008 the government of Trinidad and Tobago recognized the importance of business tourism and agreed to the establishment of a national Convention Bureau, with the mandate to position Port of Spain as the Meetings and Conference Capital of the Southern Caribbean.
Trinidad and Tobago is now poised to build upon the platform of its energy sector-generated commercial traffic to develop the important, and high yielding, discretionary business travel market.
Through the implementation of a targeted marketing strategy, the newly established Trinidad and Tobago Convention Bureau (TTCB) is working to increase the country’s share in this lucrative international, Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions market.
Over the last few years Trinidad and Tobago has developed a track record for successfully hosting several major and very prestigious conferences including the Caribbean Hotel Tourism Investment Conference (CHTIC) (2008), the Florida Caribbean Cruise Association Conference (2008), and more recently, the Summit of the Americas (2009) and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (2009).
The capital city of Port of Spain boasts the largest conference facilities in the English speaking Caribbean including the Hyatt Regency Trinidad, with 43,000 square feet of meeting space complete with break-out rooms and top notch technology- and the Hilton Trinidad Conference Centre, with 40,000 square feet of meeting space. Other options for large events include the Cascadia Hotel and Conference Centre, the Crowne Plaza and the theatre of the new National Academy of the Performing Arts.
Port of Spain also has a range of accommodation options from luxury boutique hotels and first class international properties to smaller hotels and guesthouses. The Kapok Hotel, Courtyard by Marriott, Carlton Savannah and Cara Suites Hotel are among those that can provide excellent meeting spaces for smaller meeting needs.
On Trinidad’s sister isle of Tobago, the Mt Irvine Bay Hotel and Golf Club, Tropikist Beach Hotel, Grafton Beach Resort and Coco Reef Resort and Spa also offer facilities for smaller meetings.
All of the business hotels are equipped with state of the art facilities, technical support and business amenities.
Moreover, the destination is endowed with unique creativity and experience in staging memorable events, and with the ingenuity and energy of some of our internationally recognized and world class event designers and planners, such as Peter Minshall and Brian Mc Farlane, coupled with a burgeoning events industry supplier segment in Trinidad and Tobago, we are well positioned to exploit our comparative advantage in this area.
Trinidad and Tobago is served by 19 international airlines with direct service to more destinations and connection hubs than any other country in the Southern Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago also affords easy access to key business markets throughout the region, especially those in North America and Europe with about 140,000 seats per month.
This country has a diverse and rich cultural tradition and this is evidenced by museums, art galleries, historic sites, recreational spaces and theatres all within walking distance of major hotels and conference facilities. The city of Port of Spain also offers a rich-ranging shopping experience, and exciting nightlife including various clubs, bars, comedy shows and live theatre, thereby providing a vast variety of post business entertainment and attractions for our business visitors.
Trinidad and Tobago has a diversified tourism product with two very distinct destinations thus offering a unique combination to meeting planners. While Trinidad will welcome the actual meetings, the beautiful and serene sister isle of Tobago can provide the pre and post convention tours always offered to delegates and participants. Tobago has many beautiful beaches and is internationally recognized for its rich and colourful reefs, the oldest protected rainforest in the Western Hemisphere, Main Ridge Forest, as well as forts and historical sites reminiscent of the island’s history, to name just a few of this islands added attractions .
Whatever your desire, Trinidad and Tobago offers a wide range of fun, leisure, adventure, sightseeing or relaxation.
The Trinidad and Tobago Convention Bureau (TTCB) offers comprehensive information on the island’s venues, hotels, pricing, sites and attractions. It acts as an intermediary between hotels and meetings coordinators or local chapters of international organizations, local business chambers and incoming groups and develops and issues destination bid documents for presentation to overseas meeting planners. The Bureau operates as a liaison and coordinator for hoteliers, tour guides, even consultants and tour operators ensuring a comfortable and enjoyable working environment. |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 13:28 |
HOUSTON, USA (Reuters) -- The newest threat to a vulnerable US oil refining industry may be looming 80 miles off the coast of Florida, on the island of Grand Bahama.
There, a huge oil storage terminal is expanding capacity to handle millions of barrels of fuel shipments that could hit the US market at a time when refiners are bleeding cash and fuel demand has fallen.
The Bahamian terminal, known as Borco, is planning to add 6 million barrels in light fuel storage tanks by the end of 2011, a company executive said in an interview.
"If you're on the East Coast, you better be ready for competition," said Tim Day, managing director at First Reserve Corp, the Connecticut-based private equity firm that bought the site in 2008 with Dutch partner Vopak.
"A light sweet refiner making gasoline on the East Coast could suffer long term," he told Reuters.
First Reserve has decided to move ahead with the expansion after it received project bids and major interest from customers in late January, Day said. Borco is in talks with customers to lease the new space.
The tank expansion may cost around $350 million, Borco managing director Raymond Jones told Reuters on Friday by email.
An oft-ignored patch of the oil industry compared with high-profile exploration and production, oil storage is now gaining marquee status. A rapid expansion of Asian and Middle East refineries is lifting fuel trade between regions, and in turn, demand for terminals like Borco that handle the flows.
Since the new owners bought Borco from Venezuela's PDVSA in 2008, they have spent $150 million refurbishing it, expanding usable capacity by 80 percent to 21.5 million barrels -- enough to meet a quarter of the world's daily oil demand.
Borco's usable capacity had dropped to as little as 12 million barrels before the sale, as PDVSA used the terminal to handle mostly Venezuelan crude, allowing many of its tanks to fall into disuse.
The 40-year old terminal known among oil traders as Borco has been officially redubbed Vopak Terminal Bahamas.
But unlike most of Borco's existing storage of heavy fuel oil or crude oil, which is often shipped to US refineries for processing, the new "clean" tanks will hold already-refined light products such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil or naphtha.
Borco's capacity to store these lighter products would rise to near 8.8 million barrels, or enough tank volume to supply the United States with gasoline for a full day, based on recent demand.
With the new tanks, Borco would grow to 27.5 million barrels -- about double the size of the next-largest regional facility -- putting First Reserve in control of around a quarter of the oil tank capacity for commercial lease offshore from eastern and southern US fuel markets.
Many of the light refined products could be shipped from new overseas refineries to Borco, from where they often are sent to US markets, Day said.
First Reserve, which has invested over $12.5 billion in energy projects worldwide, may soon have interests in refining light fuels itself. It is also a partner to legendary refiner buyer Tom O'Malley in PBF Investments, a $2 billion US refinery buyout fund looking to snap up cheap plants.
Since 2008, an oil market contango -- when barrels for delivery further in the future are priced higher than prompt barrels -- has put the world's commercially available oil storage leases in high demand. The contango curve in futures markets encourages traders to hoard oil instead of selling right away.
First Reserve isn't the only one betting on more storage trade. Swiss trader Vitol will open a new 2.8 million-barrel clean fuels terminal in Florida in April, and PetroChina has taken up a large 5 million-barrel lease at a fuel and crude oil storage facility in St. Eustatius in the Caribbean.
Borco's customers include private oil majors, state-run oil giants, foreign refiners and traders who often lease tanks for years of use, also gaining access to Borco's blending facilities and deepwater jetties. This allows them to ship bulk cargoes into Borco, mix them to any market's specifications, and store or ship them onwards, often in smaller batches.
"Most if not all major players in the oil and oil products markets have expressed interest for storage at Borco," Day said, declining to name specific customers.
Industry sources told Reuters they already include big Asian refiners like Reliance Industries, which controls a new 1.24 million barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery complex in India and is using Borco to stage regular shipments of gasoline into US markets.
A flood of new fuel from abroad could squeeze US refiners like Valero Energy Corporation or Sunoco Inc, with several plants each on the East Coast, where three refineries were closed last year and others are on sale. The region's plants are facing their third straight year of slumping margins.
Around half of supplies that move through Borco now are bound for the United States, Day said.
Industry sources say customers like Venezuela's PDVSA use Borco to stage Venezuelan heavy fuel oil exports to China, and Petrobras is using it to handle new Brazilian oil exports.
Borco's building spree comes after its customers requested more space to lease, but it's also based on one seeming paradox: the customers want to sell more fuel into a US market where demand is shrinking.
"Demand is stagnant and potentially declining. Why do you need more storage?" said Mark Gilman, an oil analyst at the Benchmark Company in New York.
US crude and oil product demand plunged by more than 2 million bpd since 2007 amid a financial crisis. A push for fuel efficiency means US gasoline use may never recover to 2007 levels, according to the Energy Information Administration.
In 2008, the United States became a net exporter of distillate fuels and a net exporter of gasoline in 2009.
Still, the country remains by far the top market for fuel, and a favorite dumping ground for other regions' extra supply.
While Asia has the fastest-growing market for oil products, its refining capacity may grow even quicker than demand, creating a glut that needs to be stored or sopped up in other regions.
World refining capacity should expand by 8.7 million bpd through 2014, with Asia and the Middle East making up 75 percent of growth, International Energy Agency data shows.
In December, China became a net exporter of refined oil for the first time since at least 1993.
"(If) China all of a sudden found itself with 5 million barrels a day of excess capacity and decided to dump it in the Western hemisphere, that would be a bad thing for Western refiners," said Peter Beutel of Cameron Hanover in Connecticut.
As Borco grows its capacity next-door to vulnerable US refiners, First Reserve may also be betting that easy access to oil storage will allow some US refiners to flourish even if others fail.
The equity firm could soon get its own stake in a heavy oil refinery on the East Coast, through PBF Investments, the buyout fund where it holds a one-third stake.
PBF is in advanced talks to buy the Delaware City refinery, which was shuttered by Valero in late 2009, since it was losing up to $1 million a day.
Famed for buying cheap, troubled refineries and turning them profitable, O'Malley also chairs Petroplus, another PBF shareholder, which owns refineries in Europe.
Day declined to comment on PBF's plans. But experts say the use of distribution terminals like Borco could give O'Malley -- or others with a transatlantic refining network - an important edge, by helping them stage fuel shipments or "refinery arbitrage" between regions.
Europe has had chronic shortages of diesel fuel that could be supplied via Borco. The fuel could even come from US refineries if margins improve, as they might if some more plants are shut down.
Vopak, the world's largest tank terminal operator, operates the site and lists it as the company's largest in the world. First Reserve owns 80 percent of Borco while Vopak has a 20 percent stake.
The owners' move to rapidly expand storage leases at Borco now looks prescient: Demand for storage has since boomed due to the market contango. Last year, traders even parked more than 100 million barrels of oil in ships at sea, with terminals like Borco brimming with crude. |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 13:25 |
KINGSTON, Jamaica (JIS) -- Minister of Energy and Mining, James Robertson, on Wednesday broke ground for the US$49 million Wigton Wind Farm expansion project in Jamaica.
The project will include the installation of nine new two-megawatt wind turbines that will generate 18 megawatts of power, increasing the total amount of energy produced by Wigton to 38.7 megawatts. The power will be sold to the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) for domestic use.
In addition, plant operating facilities will be improved and a resource room for educational and technical information exchange established.
The expansion will mean approximately 55 gigawatt hours of energy, enough to power about 24,000 homes. It will also result in saving of about 32,400 barrels of oil valued at US$2.3 million, and in so doing, avoid 45,954 tonnes of carbon emissions, as wind energy is cleaner than energy derived from oil.
The project advances the new energy thrust by the Government and the Ministry of Energy and Mining, as stated in the National Energy Policy.
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| Minister of Energy and Mining, James Robertson |
According to Robertson, "a cornerstone of this policy is diversifying our energy base. We will find new ways to power our economy and to reduce the amount of energy we use. We will explore indigenous sources of energy and clean technologies, thereby injecting life into research institutions and generating new, green jobs at a time when new jobs are so sorely needed."
He noted further that "this policy will also enable us to reduce pollution and thereby protect the health of all Jamaicans as they go about their daily business. It will demonstrate that Jamaica is a responsible global citizen as we minimise our emissions of greenhouse gases, and reduce our carbon footprint."
The expansion of the Wigton Wind Farm will increase Jamaica's energy output from renewable sources and help the country to meet its target of 11 per cent of energy needs from renewable sources by 2010. At present, only 5 per cent of Jamaica's energy comes from renewable sources.
Wigton Wind Farm is a subsidiary of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ), which is an agency of the Ministry of Energy and Mining. Wigton was incorporated in 2000 to develop wind farms and similar renewable energy systems to harness energy for generation of electricity for commercial and domestic use.
Wigton has been supplying wind generated energy to the JPS grid and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth for some time. The expansion will add to this effort.
The project will be built on a turnkey basis by Vestas Eolica of Spain with local input in engineering, studies and construction. Wigton has said that commissioning of the plant is scheduled for July 2010 and the project is 100 per cent financed from the PetroCaribe Development Fund. |
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