One-stop services

Trinidad and Tobago

Palaash Narase, operations manager of Aronco Services, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s strategy and recent expansion, as well as the importance of holistic planning for the region’s new energy industries. Aronco Services is a local company that provides construction and maintenance services and vehicle rental for the energy industry.

What have been the key activities carried out by Aronco in the regional and North American markets since we last spoke in 2023?
We have expanded our diversification efforts to markets outside of Trinidad. We have operations in Guyana, where we work in the civil construction and extractive industries.
Currently, we have offices in the US in Texas and Ohio, where we have brought the more than 25 years of experience in the steel industry and quality of work we initially developed here in Trinidad to deliver to the North American market. We are now in our third year of operations in the US doing plant turnaround services for multinationals in the steel, cement and petrochemicals industries.

How has this expansion to the North American market supported development within the company?
Through the referrals made to multinationals by our local partners – some of whom have also expanded internationally – we were able to seize opportunities in Canada, the USA and Mexico, and we have even been invited by companies in other global regions such as the Middle East to explore more opportunities.
We have business partners from Mexico and Latin America who have been able to seamlessly integrate into our operations, thereby bringing greater technical acumen as a group. This helps us to offer more innovative solutions at all our operational sites.

What is the strategy behind providing multiple and niche-type services?
The relationship built on reliability and trust that we have developed with our clients has helped us to open new markets within the industry. We can provide and service conveyor belts, cooling towers, refractory and insulation services, and electrical systems, among others.
The significance of this diversity is that it allows us to offer a one-stop service to our clients, which is convenient for them because they do not have to worry about keeping up with multiple companies and aspects. They can leave the plant in our hands as one company, and when it is handed back, they only have one company to interact with for follow-up services. This makes us more marketable. There are also economies of scale to be gained both in terms of time and finances.
For some of the new additions to our portfolio, we have been able to partner with both local and international contractors and raw material suppliers.

How have supply challenges in the downstream impacted the activity of service providers in the industry?
We have to look at this from a macroeconomic perspective. Declining natural gas availability has created a reduction in the growth of the local industry. However, it has also created greater competition. With the current competitiveness, the resilient companies are able to rise higher and expand outside of Trinidad.
Some local companies have expanded regionally to Guyana and Suriname to provide support and share their knowledge base. This, in turn, drives a faster growth curve in those countries. The experience developed in the industry in Trinidad can be beneficial to all the regional partners of the energy industry.

What kind of planning is important for the region’s developing energy markets?
Planning should be approached from a holistic perspective. It is important to develop policies which emphasise that multinational corporations understand the importance of knowledge transfer and environmental concerns, and that policy makers put the right strategies in place to create a healthy mix of local and expat-integrated labour systems and technologies. The executional arm needs to be in sync with the vision of the technocrats.
If done properly, and all industries are developed with a common vision and goal from the planning phase, then the execution can follow in such a way that all industries work cohesively. For example, Guyana has untouched areas of Amazon rainforest, and the development of various aspects of its industries – roads, bridges, housing, ports – could ideally take place with the common vision of preserving that, starting at the planning stage and executing around that vision. All stakeholders need to be involved and aligned with the same goal and focus as the technocrats.
Trinidad began with an abundance of reserves which were extracted, then we started looking at a macroeconomic plan to bring it all together. Execution started before proper planning took place. If things had been done differently in Trinidad years ago and planning was done more holistically, we could have already been positioned with secondary, tertiary, perhaps even quaternary downstream industries by now. Guyana has plenty of space for those kinds of downstream facilities. If we were to leverage regional connectedness, we could have a manufacturing super-hub producing and exporting many downstream products in the region.

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