Gail Alexan­der

The mas­ter gas plan re­ceived by the En­er­gy Min­istry on Mon­day, con­tains rec­om­men­da­tions on nat­ur­al gas sup­ply, trans­fer pric­ing, roy­al­ty gas and a gas al­lo­ca­tion pol­i­cy, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Nicole Olivierre said yes­ter­day.

In her con­tri­bu­tion to the 2017 Bud­get de­bate in Par­lia­ment, Olivierre con­firmed the plan was re­ceived. This was af­ter Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar on Thurs­day had queried its where­abouts.

The plan pro­vides the frame­work un­der which all nat­ur­al gas sec­tor is­sues will be ad­dressed.

"The En­er­gy Stand­ing Com­mit­tee en­gaged a spe­cial sub-com­mit­tee to re­view the rec­om­men­da­tions of the plan de­vel­oped by Poten and Part­ners. The team de­lib­er­at­ed for sev­er­al weeks and held con­sul­ta­tions with all nat­ur­al gas sec­tor stake­hold­ers," Olivierre said.

"On Mon­day, the sub-com­mit­tee's chair­man pre­sent­ed me with a com­pre­hen­sive re­port with clear rec­om­men­da­tions that Gov­ern­ment may wish to pur­sue as pri­or­i­ty mea­sures."

Oth­er ar­eas the plan cov­ers in­clude cross-bor­der gas sup­plies, the role of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) and LNG con­tract re­new­al. The min­is­ter will take the re­port to the next meet­ing of the En­er­gy Stand­ing Com­mit­tee for ap­proval.

Once ap­proved for im­ple­men­ta­tion, more in­for­ma­tion will be pro­vid­ed to Par­lia­ment, she said.

Olivierre said con­sul­ta­tions with all stake­hold­ers took place in Au­gust on the Plan as well as en­er­gy sec­tor pol­i­cy.

She said the prog­no­sis was for fair­ly sta­ble gas prices in the near fu­ture up to US$)2.87MMB­TU in 2017. How­ev­er, the re­sults of the nat­ur­al gas re­serves au­dit, which was just re­ceived, has shown a 0.9 TCF de­crease in proven re­serves which now stand at 10.6 TCF.

Risked prob­a­ble and pos­si­ble re­serves, as well as ex­plo­ration po­ten­tial, are al­so re­duced.

"This low re­serves re­place­ment ra­tion of 34 per cent is clear­ly not sus­tain­able. But sev­er­al op­er­a­tors are do­ing work that can have a pos­i­tive im­pact on this," Olivierre said.

She added the min­istry had al­so en­gaged in re­claim­ing ac­er­age from op­er­a­tors who did not ful­fil their manda­to­ry work pro­grammes.

"We're in the process of re­claim­ing acreage from one op­er­a­tor and the re­claimed blocks will even­tu­al­ly be of­fered for ex­plo­ration to the in­dus­try," she said.

Olivierre said Petrotrin had been man­dat­ed to ar­rest crude oil pro­duc­tion de­cline, in­clud­ing by seek­ing new com­mer­cial part­ner­ships to de­vel­op Trin­mar's as­sets.

An in­ter­na­tion­al con­sul­tant will be en­gaged to ad­vise on a part­ner for the en­tire Trin­mar ac­er­age.

Based on var­i­ous strate­gies in Petrotrin's five-year busi­ness plan, crude oil pro­duc­tion is ex­pect­ed to re­main "fair­ly sta­ble around 44,538 bar­rels in 2017, pro­ject­ed to in­crease to 59,472 by 2020."

De­tail­ing drilling/ex­plo­ration by var­i­ous com­pa­nies, Oliviere said a Shal­low Wa­ter Com­pet­i­tive Bid Round is be­ing con­sid­ered for the first quar­ter of 2017 and an On­shore Com­pet­i­tive Bid Round may be con­sid­ered in the "near fu­ture once the mar­ket re­cov­ers."

Olivierre said the re­ac­ti­vat­ed T&T-Ghana in­vest­ment agree­ment will al­low this coun­try to own "a tan­gi­ble ac­tu­al re­al piece of phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture in Ghana for trans­mis­sion of nat­ur­al gas for pow­er gen­er­a­tion. This will earn valu­able for­eign ex­change and help di­ver­si­fy state en­ter­prise rev­enue base."

The Sup­ple­men­tal Pe­tro­le­um Tax is be­ing ad­dressed to deal with cur­rent dis­in­cen­tives to small and medi­um op­er­a­tors and to en­cour­age pro­duc­tion of "strand­ed" oil and gas on land and off­shore.

She added that there had been sig­nif­i­cant progress on long­stand­ing Lo­ran Man­a­tee ne­go­ti­a­tions. A fi­nal draft un­der­stand­ing of agree­ment (UOA) was re­ceived in re­sponse to a Sep­tem­ber 20 dead­line giv­en by the Min­istry and the agree­ment is be­ing re­viewed.

"By year end we'll be so much clos­er to see­ing that cross bor­der ar­riv­ing in a pipeline in T&T," Olivierre said.