Geisha Kow­lessar

Petrotrin is de­fend­ing its po­si­tion to con­duct ocean bot­tom ca­ble seis­mic sur­veys, in­sist­ing these were not on­ly nec­es­sary for ex­plor­ing for oil and gas, but posed no harm to the fish.The State-owned oil com­pa­ny al­so called on the Gov­ern­ment to fund lo­cal re­search in­to the mat­ter, say­ing such stud­ies were lack­ing.

At a press con­fer­ence at its cor­po­rate head­quar­ters at Queen's Park West, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, Petrotrin's pres­i­dent Khalid Has­sanali said the sur­vey was one of sev­er­al ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion projects which would con­tribute to the con­tin­ued growth of the en­er­gy sec­tor and by ex­ten­sion the econ­o­my."Our eco­nom­ics at Petrotrin is most high­ly sen­si­tive to the amount of lo­cal crude that we process. So this is what this is all about," Has­sanali said.

He added that Petrotrin's sharply fo­cused ini­tia­tive was find­ing more gas and oil and pro­duc­ing those re­serves."When we have fields, say for in­stance in the Gulf of Paria, which are about 300 and those fields are at least 50 years old and we al­so have our land op­er­a­tions where those fields are 100 years old and on the land op­er­a­tions we are pro­duc­ing an av­er­age of eight bar­rels day per well which is very low," Has­sanali said.

"In the ma­rine op­er­a­tions about 70 bar­rels per day per well which is al­so by ma­rine stan­dards not very high...it is be­cause of the ma­tu­ri­ty of these fields on land and off­shore that we have to have re­al­ly in­ten­sive ac­tiv­i­ty and to be able to dis­cov­er new re­serves."Has­sanali said Petrotrin which em­ployed about 5,500 peo­ple con­tributes be­tween $2 bil­lion and $5 bil­lion to the econ­o­my an­nu­al­ly.

Petrotrin's Cur­tis Archie, man­ag­er ex­plo­ration and geo­physics, said the deci­bel lev­els of the un­der­wa­ter puls­es gen­er­at­ed dur­ing the seis­mic sur­vey were sim­i­lar to "nat­u­ral­ly oc­cur­ring sounds in the ocean.""The sound from the sur­vey does not ex­ceed 250 deci­bels which can be com­pared to a ship sound which was close to the hull which emits 200 deci­bels and a bot­tlenose dol­phin "click" which emits 229 deci­bels," Archie said.

Say­ing no ex­plo­sives would be used in the sur­vey, Archie said in­stead two air emit­ting de­vices would be de­ployed be­hind a source ves­sel."Com­pressed air is re­leased in­to the wa­ter at high pres­sure to gen­er­ate puls­es for record­ing...No ex­plo­sion will be cre­at­ed," he said."When one area is com­plet­ed, op­er­a­tions will move to the next ad­ja­cent area un­til the to­tal sur­veyed area is cov­ered."He said fish­er­folk would have ac­cess to 98 per cent of the 510 square kilo­me­tres sur­vey area.

"At any time on­ly an area of two kilo­me­tre by six kilo­me­tre rep­re­sent­ing two per cent of the to­tal seis­mic area will be re­strict­ed," Archie said.On con­cerns that the fish would mi­grate he said in some in­stances the fish in the im­me­di­ate area of the emit­ting de­vice move to low­er depths re­sult­ing in an "in­creased fish catch there­after."