Anthony Paul

Anthony Paul is a senior energy and strategy adviser from Trinidad and Tobago with more than four decades in the oil and gas industry. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Africa Energy Technology Centre (AETC), bringing long experience of how producing countries can retain more of the value of their petroleum resources. He has advised ministers, regulators and investors in dozens of countries across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Central and Southern Asia, among them Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Angola, Tanzania, Uganda and Guyana.

Paul began his career at Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries, where he worked until 1991, and served as the Government’s Director of Geology and Geophysics, responsible for attracting investors, running licensing rounds, negotiating contracts and overseeing exploration. He then worked at Petrotrin, the former state oil company, before holding technical, commercial and management roles at Amoco and BP in Trinidad and Tobago and at BP plc, covering exploration, field development, production operations and digital and supply chain strategy. He moved into consulting in 2003.

Since then his work has centred on local content and in-country value addition. He was lead author of, or adviser on, local content strategies and policies for BP Trinidad and Tobago and for the governments of Trinidad and Tobago (2003 to 2004), Ghana (upstream in 2010 and downstream in 2015), Guyana (2016 to 2021), Kenya (2018 to 2019) and Mozambique (2020 to 2022), where he was hydrocarbons senior adviser to the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy. He advised Chatham House’s petroleum governance programmes from 2005 to 2020, is a former member of the governing board of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), and is a Fellow of the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) in Accra. He is principal consultant at the Association of Caribbean Energy Specialists (ACES).

Paul holds a bachelor’s degree in geology from Imperial College, University of London, and a master’s degree in geophysics from the University of Houston. He founded and chaired the Centre for Energy Enterprise Development in Trinidad and Tobago and sat on the council of the South Trinidad Chamber of Industry and Commerce (now the Energy Chamber) from 2001 to 2005. He argues that citizens, as owners of the resources, deserve transparency, and writing in Guyana’s Kaieteur News in 2026 he drew on Trinidad and Tobago’s experience to call for public access to petroleum licences and agreements, a statutory public petroleum register and protection of assets the state has paid for.