On Tues­day, bpTT an­nounced that it had ap­point­ed a new head of its T&T op­er­a­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the com­pa­ny, David Camp­bell will as­sume the role of pres­i­dent of its T&T busi­ness ef­fec­tive Oc­to­ber 1, sub­ject to work per­mit ap­proval.

It not­ed that in this role, Camp­bell will be ac­count­able for the “safe de­liv­ery and growth of the busi­ness in T&T.”

He suc­ceeds Claire Fitz­patrick, who has led bpTT’s op­er­a­tions since 2018 and who will be mov­ing to the UK to take up a new lead­er­ship role at BP’s Lon­don head­quar­ters.

Camp­bell will join bpTT hav­ing spent the last eight years in the po­si­tion of pres­i­dent bp Rus­sia, and will meet a com­pa­ny that is in many ways a shad­ow of it­self—its pro­duc­tion pro­file is down, many of its work­ers are sur­vivors of some of the deep­est per­son­nel cuts in its lo­cal his­to­ry and it has not had ex­plo­ration suc­cess for at least five years.

Make no mis­take about it, how­ev­er, bpTT is eas­i­ly one of the most im­por­tant com­pa­nies in this coun­try.

In the five-year pe­ri­od pri­or to Fitz­patrick tak­ing con­trol of the or­gan­i­sa­tion, it paid the Gov­ern­ment over $21 bil­lion in roy­al­ties. This does not in­clude PPT, SPT or PAYE and does not take in­to ac­count the mul­ti­pli­er ef­fect.

BpTT is al­so the key com­pa­ny re­spon­si­ble for the sus­te­nance of the peo­ple of Ma­yaro and en­vi­rons. In fact, to the peo­ple of that area, bpTT is more im­por­tant in terms of the eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty it gen­er­ates than the cen­tral gov­ern­ment, which in­vests lit­tle and pro­vides the Rio Claro/Ma­yaro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion with even less mon­ey. Per­haps lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form will make a dif­fer­ence.

At the time that Fitz­patrick took over at bpTT, the com­pa­ny was on a high. It had just made new ex­plo­ration dis­cov­er­ies and was award­ed three deep-wa­ter ex­plo­ration blocks. It was still one of the largest part­ners in all four LNG trains and was earn­ing sig­nif­i­cant rev­enue in T&T, while in­vest­ing in the coun­try.

The last four years have, how­ev­er, proven chal­leng­ing for bpTT.

BpTT’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion has plum­met­ed from over 2 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bscf/d) in 2018, to 1.087 (bscf/d) as of May this year.

A pre­cip­i­tous de­cline.

It has had to deal with a failed in­fill drilling pro­gramme that now has it un­able to meet its con­trac­tu­al com­mit­ment to At­lantic and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny Ltd, and this is the ma­jor rea­son for the coun­try’s gas cur­tail­ment chal­lenges.

In the last four years, bpTT has al­so not been able to de­liv­er some of its projects on time. Its Cas­sia C project is still to come to mar­ket, some 18 months be­hind sched­ule, and on­ly re­cent­ly, Fitz­patrick said she had no re­grets that the fab­ri­ca­tion was done in Mex­i­co and not in Point Fortin, which ul­ti­mate­ly is the rea­son for the de­lays in project ex­e­cu­tion.

In the last four years, bpTT has not had a sin­gle ex­plo­ration suc­cess and was part of a bid for the shal­low wa­ter that was not worth the pa­per it was writ­ten on.

In the last four years, bpTT has al­so made the largest lay­offs in its his­to­ry and as with all re­duc­tions in staff, has left many still trau­ma­tised.

The com­pa­ny, in the last four years, has tak­en con­tract­ing de­ci­sions that have sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duced the op­por­tu­ni­ties for small con­trac­tors in its home op­er­a­tions, in favour of large na­tion­al and even in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies.

It was the Busi­ness Guardian that a year ago, broke the sto­ry that bpTT had told the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion that go­ing for­ward, it should ex­pect much low­er than fore­cast nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, with the short­fall be­ing as high as 15 per cent last year and over ten per cent un­til 2024.

In a con­fi­den­tial se­ries of doc­u­ments which Guardian Me­dia ob­tained, bpTT al­so told the ad­min­is­tra­tion that it had sus­tained sig­nif­i­cant loss­es over a five-year pe­ri­od, in­clud­ing a whop­ping $2.825 bil­lion be­fore tax in 2020.

The doc­u­ments showed that even with the an­nounced projects like Mat­a­pal and Cas­sia C, while they will in­crease pro­duc­tion by about 140 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scf/d) of gas, this will still fall short by an av­er­age of over 200 mm­scf/d.

The bpTT fore­cast, which con­tin­ues un­til the end of the decade, showed the com­pa­ny will not re­turn to pro­duc­ing the two bil­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas.

At the time of the rev­e­la­tion of the con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment, bpTT had tried to force the Busi­ness Guardian to not pub­lish in­for­ma­tion that we felt was in the pub­lic’s in­ter­est. In a let­ter from its at­tor­neys, the com­pa­ny want­ed an un­der­tak­ing that GML and my­self would nev­er again pub­lish the graphs and charts that showed its fore­cast of low pro­duc­tion fig­ures. It al­leged that this was a breach of its con­fi­den­tial­i­ty.

bpTT, through its at­tor­neys, wrote: “As a good cor­po­rate cit­i­zen, our client has in­struct­ed us not to is­sue a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter at this stage, how­ev­er, should you con­tin­ue to pub­lish the con­fi­den­tial ma­te­r­i­al or any part there­of and/or fail to pro­vide the un­der­tak­ings, af­fi­davit or pro­pos­als sought by the dead­line stip­u­lat­ed for do­ing so (as set out above), our client re­serves the right to take this mat­ter fur­ther, in­clud­ing giv­ing us in­struc­tions to is­sue a pre-ac­tion let­ter, to ap­ply ex-parte for an in­junc­tion or quia timet in­junc­tion (as the case may be) and to seek dam­ages.”

The Busi­ness Guardian stood its ground and con­tin­ued to pub­lish be­cause we felt it was in the pub­lic’s in­ter­est.

The present low pro­duc­tion fig­ures show that the fore­cast was cor­rect and had the coun­try been pro­duc­ing larg­er amounts of nat­ur­al gas and crude oil, we would have been in a much bet­ter fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion to­day to deal with the chal­lenges we face as a na­tion.

So, Mr Camp­bell, the coun­try will wel­come you and we hope that you will lead the or­gan­i­sa­tion to a re­turn to suc­cess. Al­ready, there are some good signs.

BpTT has put in joint bids for the deep wa­ter bid rounds and is set to drill some more wells in its acreage.

The com­pa­ny has al­ready tast­ed suc­cess with Wood­side as an op­er­a­tor in the deep wa­ter and it con­tin­ues to try to bring to mar­ket gas from the Colum­bus basin.

The coun­try needs a suc­cess­ful bpTT. One hopes Mr Camp­bell will lead it to a re­boot and greater suc­cess in T&T.