The two largest oil and gas com­pa­nies in the world, Roy­al Dutch Shell and BPTT were the on­ly ones to bid for the rights to ex­plore for oil and gas in the coun­try’s 2018 shal­low wa­ter com­pet­i­tive bid round.

The com­pa­nies joined forces in joint bids for blocks 4 (c), U (c), and Low­er Re­verse L, which are all lo­cat­ed East of Trinidad, where both com­pa­nies al­ready op­er­ate sev­er­al blocks.

No bids were made for the oth­er blocks that were avail­able, name­ly NC­MA 2 and NC­MA 3, which are both lo­cat­ed North of Trinidad, and 1 (b) which is West of Trinidad. This ef­fec­tive­ly means that half of the blocks were not bid on and there will be no com­pe­ti­tion in what was sup­posed to be a com­pet­i­tive bid round.

“It is quite promis­ing to see that some in­ter­est has been gen­er­at­ed de­spite volatile en­er­gy prices over the last three years in par­tic­u­lar,” Khan told the gath­er­ing as the bids were re­vealed.

But the Min­is­ter ad­mit­ted that he ex­pect­ed Shell to bid on NC­MA 2 and NC­MA 3, while he felt the po­ten­tial for 1(b) was so small that on­ly a com­pa­ny like De­N­o­vo would bid on it be­cause they are al­ready op­er­at­ing in the Gulf of Paria.

Khan claimed that part of the chal­lenge was the fact that three of the four largest en­er­gy com­pa­nies in the world were al­ready op­er­at­ing in T&T and there­fore it would be a chal­lenge for a new en­trant.

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter al­so crit­i­cised the re­cent me­dia re­port­ing on the sec­tor, call­ing for “ma­tu­ri­ty and dis­cre­tion” .

Khan ques­tioned why his an­nounce­ment that the coun­try’s gas re­serves had in­creased in 2017 when com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year had got­ten lit­tle or no cov­er­age. This is even though the in­crease was the first year on year since 2004 ac­cord­ing to the 2017 Ry­der Scott re­port.

“Oth­er as­pects of the in­dus­try get cov­er­age you know...but its par for the course, we ac­cept it as that, that’s what the me­dia strives on but we have to be very care­ful that in telegraph­ing en­er­gy news a cer­tain lev­el of ma­tu­ri­ty and dis­cre­tion has to pre­vail. This is an in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness,” Khan said.

“This is a busi­ness of ex­treme­ly high cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture, this is a busi­ness that the pos­i­tive con­se­quences are enor­mous, but the neg­a­tive con­se­quences are equal­ly grave and that is the lev­el of ma­tu­ri­ty that we have to bring to the cov­er­age of en­er­gy is­sues,” he added.

Khan said every­body has be­come an en­er­gy ex­pert overnight.

“I like that be­cause the in­ter­est is there but what I say is that we have to be guard­ed how we tele­graph the news and the con­se­quences that can flow,” he said.

When it was point­ed out to Khan that not on­ly had it been re­port­ed but, un­like past gov­ern­ments which re­leased the re­port, the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion has not even made it avail­able to Par­lia­ment, he then promised to make a con­densed ver­sion avail­able.

The T&T Guardian re­port­ed this in­crease on Oct 26 last year in an ar­ti­cle ti­tled “Re­serves on the Rise”.

The 2018 Ry­der Scott re­port is ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by Au­gust and an on­go­ing au­dit of the coun­try’s oil re­serves by Nether­land, Sea­well and As­so­ciates Inc is ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by the third quar­ter of this year.

Khan said the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to launch a deep wa­ter com­pet­i­tive bid round next year.