BHP, the Aus­tralian out­fit drilling in T&Ts deep wa­ter has an­nounced that its lat­est well, Car­ni­val-1 failed and was a dry hole.

This means that nei­ther oil nor gas was found in the well and it was plugged and aban­doned.

In its op­er­a­tional re­view the com­pa­ny said it drilled two well in what it called its north­ern li­cences, one en­coun­tered hy­dro­car­bons while the oth­er was a dry hole.

It read: “In Trinidad and To­ba­go, we drilled two ad­di­tion­al ex­plo­ration wells in our North­ern li­cences as a part of Phase 4 of our deep-wa­ter drilling cam­paign. The Boom-1 well was spud on 28 Au­gust 2019 and en­coun­tered hy­dro­car­bons.

“Eval­u­a­tion and analy­sis is on­go­ing. The Car­ni­val-1 well was spud on 30 Sep­tem­ber 2019 and reached to­tal depth af­ter the end of the Sep­tem­ber 2019 quar­ter. The well was a dry hole.”

This is the first dry well the com­pa­ny has drilled in its North­ern li­cences and Boom-1 makes it 5 out of six suc­cess­ful wells.

BHP is the op­er­a­tor of the Blocks with BP as its part­ner.

BHP said this com­plet­ed the ex­plo­ration pro­gram on its Trinidad and To­ba­go North­ern li­cences.

“Eval­u­a­tion and de­vel­op­ment plan­ning stud­ies of the dis­cov­er­ies in the North are on­go­ing.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan has in the past said BHP is seek­ing to get a suf­fi­cient size of re­serves in its North­ern Li­cense to de­ter­mine if the deep wa­ter blocks will be eco­nom­ic to pro­duce.

What the com­pa­ny has al­ready de­ter­mine it is eco­nom­ic to pro­duce is its Ru­by oil field which it sanc­tioned in Au­gust.

In its op­er­a­tional re­view the com­pa­ny said: Dur­ing the Sep­tem­ber 2019 quar­ter, the BHP Board ap­proved an in­vest­ment of US$283 mil­lion (BHP share) for the de­vel­op­ment of the Ru­by oil and gas project in Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

It is ex­pect­ed to drill five pro­duc­tion wells, tied back in­to its ex­ist­ing op­er­at­ed pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ties, with ca­pac­i­ty to pro­duce up to 16,000 gross bar­rels of oil per day and 80 mil­lion gross stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day.