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La Brea based Trinidad Offshore Fabricators Company Limited (TOFCO) has been awarded a contract to build the jacket for bpTT’s latest offshore development, Cassia C. In confirming the award of the contract, company officials said it will create an additional 50 jobs.
This contract is much smaller than the Juniper project which was awarded for both the jacket and topside. This time around, the topside has been awarded to McDermoth and will be constructed in Mexico.
However, this is still a mini victory for T&T as bpTT’s last platform, constructed for the Angelin field, was built entirely in Mexico. At that time the company explained that it could not trust that the platform would be delivered on time because of protests in La Brea that causes work disruption at TOFCO’s operations. Since then, the country has been losing money and business as the fall-out from the protests continue.
It is expected that construction will take place over one year.
The loss of the Angelin platform project prompted Government earlier this year to hold a town meeting in La Brea at which Energy Minister Franklin Khan along with MP for the area Nicole Oliverre addressed residents.
Oliverre said: “We were all greatly disappointed by the loss of Angelin, not just to La Brea, but to Trinidad and Tobago. Angelin is a smaller platform than Juniper but you have an idea the kind of value we lost when Angelin was sent to Mexico.
“Minister Khan and I recently paid a visit to the Mexican fabrication yard where the Angelin platform is being built. Apart from the size, it’s a much larger land area. There is nothing they are doing there that we couldn’t do here in La Brea.”
She added: “We must not be insular when it comes to jobs in the area. If we say that jobs in La Brea must only go to the people from La Brea, then the rest of the country can say the same thing and not want La Brea people to work elsewhere. Yes, we put La Brea first but in the same way, people from La Brea work in Point Lisas and Port of Spain and throughout Trinidad and Tobago, once you are a citizen of this country we cannot debar anyone from coming here to work.”
A jacket refers, in oil and gas exploration and production, to the steel frame supporting the deck and the topsides on a fixed offshore platform.
Meanwhile, bpTT will this week announce that it has sanctioned its Cassia C project which has been long in the making, well-placed sources at the company have confirmed.
The project will access low-pressure reserves via a new compression platform bridge linked to the existing Cassia B hub. It includes a new unmanned compression platform for the existing Cassia complex. Cassia C is bpTT’s third Cassia platform, handling gas coming from its operations in the prolific Columbus basin.
The project will add 300 million standard cubic feet of gas to bpTT’s production when it begins in 2020.