An en­er­gy an­a­lyst says US$6.2 bil­lion in in­vest­ments in deep and ul­tra-deep­wa­ter ar­eas of T&T over the next two years, will help to off­set Gov­ern­ment's ap­par­ent move away from an en­er­gy-de­pen­dent econ­o­my.Ef­fuah Al­leyne, a se­nior an­a­lyst with re­search and con­sult­ing firm Glob­al­Da­ta, said the emerg­ing trend of deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration could help to re­vive T&T's en­er­gy sec­tor. At present the ma­jor­i­ty of ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion ac­tiv­i­ty oc­curs in shal­low wa­ters of up to 250 me­tres (m) deep. "T&T's com­pet­i­tive deep­wa­ter bid­ding round end­ed in March this year, with two of six blocks award­ed to a con­sor­tium con­sist­ing of BHP Bil­li­ton and BG Group. These blocks are lo­cat­ed in wa­ter deep­er than 1,500m."As deep and ul­tra-deep­wa­ter is yet to be ful­ly ex­plored in T&T, these ar­eas could rep­re­sent vast po­ten­tial, es­pe­cial­ly as there are over 15 open blocks. These lie in the Colum­bus Basin, an ex­ten­sion of the pro­lif­ic East­ern Venezue­lan Basin, where one of the world's largest re­serves of 1 tril­lion bar­rels of heavy oil-in-place is lo­cat­ed," Al­leyne said.

In ad­di­tion to deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration, Al­leyne said re­assess­ing ma­ture as­sets is an­oth­er de­vel­op­ing trend in T&T, with nu­mer­ous re­cent dis­cov­er­ies be­ing made in some of its es­tab­lished re­serves."Rep­sol's con­tin­ued ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ties in the ma­ture Teak field re­vealed new oil ac­cu­mu­la­tions this year through dis­cov­ery well TB 14."Fur­ther­more, this area, which has been pro­duc­ing since 1972, al­so has un­ex­plored acreage on­shore and off­shore, sim­i­lar to oth­er ma­ture as­sets in the coun­try."Al­leyne said the planned en­er­gy in­vest­ments re­flect con­fi­dence that un­tapped po­ten­tial in ex­ist­ing fields and in un­der-ex­plored deep­wa­ter and ul­tra-deep­wa­ter ar­eas, could sig­nif­i­cant­ly boost the coun­try's cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture.