In some good news for the T&T en­er­gy sec­tor bp Trinidad and To­ba­go LLC (bpTT) yes­ter­day an­nounced that pro­duc­tion has start­ed from its Mat­a­pal gas project ear­li­er than ex­pect­ed.

When ful­ly ramped up the de­vel­op­ment is ex­pect­ed to pro­duce in the range of 250-350 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scfd).

The Mat­a­pal de­vel­op­ment is based on re­sources dis­cov­ered by the Sa­van­nah ex­plo­ration well, drilled in 2017 us­ing at that time first is class ocean bot­tom ca­ble and nodes seis­mic tech­nol­o­gy.

This is good news for T&T and bpTT which has seen plum­met­ing pro­duc­tion lev­els to the point where ac­cord­ing to fig­ures from the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries its pro­duc­tion was down to just over 1 bil­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day. This is just over half of the 2bcf/d the com­pa­ny pro­duced on av­er­age for most of the last decade.

The de­cline in gas pro­duc­tion by bpTT has been the ma­jor rea­son for the short­ages be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced by the coun­try and Mat­a­pal is ex­pect­ed to sure up pro­duc­tion but not nec­es­sar­i­ly add to bpTT’s net pro­duc­tion.

The com­pa­ny said the mile­stone was achieved ahead of sched­ule and un­der bud­get de­spite the con­straints brought about by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Mat­a­pal is bpTT’s sec­ond sub­sea de­vel­op­ment. It’s com­prised of three wells, which tie back in­to the ex­ist­ing Ju­niper plat­form, help­ing min­i­mize de­vel­op­ment costs and the as­so­ci­at­ed car­bon foot­print. It’s lo­cat­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 80km off the south-east coast of Trinidad and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 8km east of Ju­niper, in a wa­ter depth of 163 me­tres.

Claire Fitz­patrick, pres­i­dent bpTT, said: “Nat­ur­al gas will play an im­por­tant role in the en­er­gy tran­si­tion and to the econ­o­my of Trinidad and To­ba­go for decades to come. This is why our team at bpTT has worked dili­gent­ly to safe­ly start up our Mat­a­pal project which we suc­cess­ful­ly achieved both un­der bud­get and ahead of sched­ule. We are com­mit­ted to a strong en­er­gy fu­ture in Trinidad and To­ba­go and this project plays a crit­i­cal role in de­liv­er­ing that.”

Fab­ri­ca­tion work on Mat­a­pal be­gan in 2019. The project re­quired mod­i­fi­ca­tion to the ex­ist­ing Ju­niper plat­form as well as the con­struc­tion and in­stal­la­tion of new sub­sea equip­ment.

Im­por­tant­ly, the ma­jor­i­ty of fab­ri­ca­tion work re­quired to adapt the Ju­niper plat­form for new pro­duc­tion was com­plet­ed lo­cal­ly. Hy­dro­car­bons from Mat­a­pal will be trans­port­ed to the Ju­niper plat­form via two 9 km flex­i­ble flow­lines.

With 15 off­shore pro­duc­tion plat­forms, bpTT is the coun­try’s largest hy­dro­car­bon pro­duc­er, ac­count­ing for about 55% of the na­tion’s gas pro­duc­tion.

Mean­while En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young yes­ter­day took to Twit­ter to con­grat­u­late en­er­gy gi­ant bpTT on its “suc­cess­ful, safe and ear­ly start up of gas from Mat­a­pal.”

Young said he was look­ing for­ward to gas pro­duc­tion from this sub­sea de­vel­op­ment.

‘We have been work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly with our part­ners on se­cur­ing con­tin­ued gas pro­duc­tion. This is yet an­oth­er such suc­cess,” Young tweet­ed.