En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, along with per­ma­nent sec­re­tary Pene­lope Brad­shaw-Niles, met with the top play­ers at whol­ly state-owned, lo­cal oil com­pa­ny Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny on Wednes­day.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, Her­itage CEO Erik Kesku­la and its chair­man Michael Quam­i­na, SC, pro­vid­ed an up­date to the min­is­ter on the per­for­mance of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um in 2023.

Kesku­la gave an up­date on the re­sults of the re­cent off­shore drilling pro­grammes which, ac­cord­ing to a min­istry re­lease, yield­ed the largest Her­itage pro­duc­ing well to date and the com­pa­ny’s on­go­ing as­set in­tegri­ty ef­forts.

The Her­itage CEO al­so out­lined plans for 2024 in­clud­ing drilling pro­jec­tions, joint ven­tures, lease op­er­a­tor pro­grammes and high-grad­ing.

Young re­it­er­at­ed Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um’s strate­gic im­por­tance to Trinidad and To­ba­go and the need to re­main fo­cused on ramp­ing up pro­duc­tion.

Ear­li­er this year, Her­itage an­nounced a prof­it af­ter tax of $1.11 bil­lion for the fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2022 which in turn rep­re­sent­ed a 63 per cent in­crease over the $682.68 mil­lion prof­it af­ter tax the com­pa­ny earned for the same pe­ri­od in 2021.

For the six months end­ed March 31, 2023, Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um re­port­ed af­ter-tax prof­it of $379.35 mil­lion, which was a 32 per cent de­cline from the $557.43 mil­lion the com­pa­ny earned for the same pe­ri­od in its 2022 fi­nan­cial year.

Fol­low­ing the shut­down of the Petrotrin re­fin­ery in 2018, Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny (Her­itage) was in­cor­po­rat­ed on Oc­to­ber 5, 2018, and com­menced op­er­a­tions on De­cem­ber 1, 2018.

It is a sub­sidiary of Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd (TPHL), which is the hold­ing com­pa­ny of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um, Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny, Guaracara Re­fin­ing Com­pa­ny, and lega­cy Petrotrin.

TPHL was cre­at­ed to re­place Petrotrin, which op­er­at­ed as an in­te­grat­ed oil com­pa­ny, com­bin­ing ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion (E&P) of crude oil with the re­fin­ing of crude in­to var­i­ous fu­els, at the re­fin­ery in Pointe-a-Pierre, which were then sold on the lo­cal and re­gion­al mar­kets.

Fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment of the 2022 fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, Her­itage said it had been able to in­vest $484 mil­lion in pro­duc­tion growth, and in­vest in in­tegri­ty ex­pen­di­ture, in­fra­struc­ture, and an In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy cap­i­tal pro­gramme whilst al­so pay­ing $4.5 bil­lion in roy­al­ties, levies, and tax­es to the Gov­ern­ment of the Re­pub­lic of T&T. That was up from $2.0 bil­lion in 2021, an in­crease of 125 per cent.

Her­itage al­so stat­ed its strong per­for­mance al­lowed it to meet the in­her­it­ed debt oblig­a­tions of the Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd (TPHL) Group of Com­pa­nies. Her­itage took over Petrotrin’s debt, which was pre­vi­ous­ly held by TPHL, in May 2022, when the debt was resched­uled for the sec­ond time.