Petrotrin is defending its position to conduct ocean bottom cable seismic surveys, insisting these were not only necessary for exploring for oil and gas, but posed no harm to the fish.The State-owned oil company also called on the Government to fund local research into the matter, saying such studies were lacking.
At a press conference at its corporate headquarters at Queen's Park West, Port-of-Spain, yesterday, Petrotrin's president Khalid Hassanali said the survey was one of several exploration and production projects which would contribute to the continued growth of the energy sector and by extension the economy."Our economics at Petrotrin is most highly sensitive to the amount of local crude that we process. So this is what this is all about," Hassanali said.
He added that Petrotrin's sharply focused initiative was finding more gas and oil and producing those reserves."When we have fields, say for instance in the Gulf of Paria, which are about 300 and those fields are at least 50 years old and we also have our land operations where those fields are 100 years old and on the land operations we are producing an average of eight barrels day per well which is very low," Hassanali said.
"In the marine operations about 70 barrels per day per well which is also by marine standards not very high...it is because of the maturity of these fields on land and offshore that we have to have really intensive activity and to be able to discover new reserves."Hassanali said Petrotrin which employed about 5,500 people contributes between $2 billion and $5 billion to the economy annually.
Petrotrin's Curtis Archie, manager exploration and geophysics, said the decibel levels of the underwater pulses generated during the seismic survey were similar to "naturally occurring sounds in the ocean.""The sound from the survey does not exceed 250 decibels which can be compared to a ship sound which was close to the hull which emits 200 decibels and a bottlenose dolphin "click" which emits 229 decibels," Archie said.
Saying no explosives would be used in the survey, Archie said instead two air emitting devices would be deployed behind a source vessel."Compressed air is released into the water at high pressure to generate pulses for recording...No explosion will be created," he said."When one area is completed, operations will move to the next adjacent area until the total surveyed area is covered."He said fisherfolk would have access to 98 per cent of the 510 square kilometres survey area.
"At any time only an area of two kilometre by six kilometre representing two per cent of the total seismic area will be restricted," Archie said.On concerns that the fish would migrate he said in some instances the fish in the immediate area of the emitting device move to lower depths resulting in an "increased fish catch thereafter."
