En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan has pre­dict­ed that T&T’s crude oil pro­duc­tion will in­crease to over 90,000 bar­rels of oil per day (bo/d) by 2025 with most of the in­crease com­ing from state-owned Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Ltd.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian Khan said, “We have a fore­cast here that says we can reach 92,000 in 2025. Un­less we find new big fields. Re­mem­ber this is on the pe­riph­ery. Re­mem­ber I still want to ini­ti­ate an ex­plo­ration pro­gramme for the Cre­ta­ceous, that was the south­ern basin with Exxon, and I try­ing to put the lo­gis­tics in place for that.”

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter said he was told that there was in­ter­est by the world’s largest oil and gas com­pa­ny to look again at T&T’s on land province.

“My un­der­stand­ing is that Exxon may be in­ter­est­ed in it be­cause its Cre­ta­ceous oil they find­ing in Guyana and Suri­name you know. It is not the same basin, but we are al­ready part of the east­ern Venezuela basin. So as a long term strat­e­gy, that could be on the ta­ble, but then your time-line of the life­time now of liq­uid fu­els seem to be short­en­ing, es­pe­cial­ly Guyana’s ag­gres­sive de­vel­op­ment plan which is dri­ven by Exxon and I see the same thing is go­ing to hap­pen in Suri­name,” Khan not­ed.

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter said there is fair­ly good jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to go af­ter the Cre­ta­ceous “if we take a sec­ond look with the new tech­nol­o­gy that is avail­able, the new think­ing in ge­o­log­i­cal mod­el­ling it is worth a try again.

“Cur­tis, imag­ine Exxon ran a Cre­ta­ceous ex­plo­ration pro­gramme with on­ly 2d seis­mic. That was in the 80s, I worked on that project, I was in Hous­ton for two years and the team leader of that project con­tact­ed me last year, he is now re­tired. He said he has done some work in Papua New Guinea, you know they find­ing big gas there, and he said ‘I will like the op­por­tu­ni­ty to come back to Trinidad to take a look at the basin again’, so I think I will take up his of­fer short­ly,” Khan said.

With re­spect to in­creased pro­duc­tion from Her­itage, Khan said the com­pa­ny’s first port of call was to sta­bilise its pro­duc­tion which it has achieved.

He said, “I think they have done that so. Now I am speak­ing to them very reg­u­lar­ly and I have told them I want a laser-beam fo­cus on pro­duc­tion and they are do­ing that. They have eval­u­at­ed the Trin­mar acreage, there is the Ju­bilee field that they are go­ing out to a joint ven­ture for, there is South-West Sol­da­do which they will be go­ing on a joint ven­ture for, to bring in the in­vest­ment lev­el, to bring in the pro­duc­tion.”

Ac­cord­ing to the En­er­gy Min­is­ter Her­itage will al­so seek to in­crease the lease op­er­a­tor­ship/farm-out on­shore and he has told them they have to come up with their own drilling pro­gramme for the land-based as­sets.

The min­is­ter al­so promised to have a bid round for fur­ther deep ex­plo­ration in what is called the Siparia syn­cline for Her­reras, sim­i­lar to what Touch­stone has made sev­er­al dis­cov­er­ies.

He said, “This will prob­a­bly take about two years but I can see Her­itage ramp­ing up to over 60/70,000 bar­rels of oil per day by 2024.”

With re­spect to the Ju­bilee field Khan said while Her­itage had gone out to mar­ket with a Re­quest for Pro­pos­al (RFP) it was now go­ing out to ten­der the field.

“They are hav­ing a lot of in­ter­est in it. Ju­bilee is a heavy oil­field eh.”

With re­spect to the South-West Sol­da­do field and the co-op­er­a­tion agree­ment with Roy­al Dutch Shell Khan said an an­nounce­ment will be made soon.

“We have some­thing in place for South-West Sol­da­do which we will make pub­lic, I would say with­in a month or so. Stay post­ed on that.”

Khan ac­knowl­edged that the field has al­ways had sig­nif­i­cant po­ten­tial but has been fraught with chal­lenges.

“At least what we have now is the Mopo, that is bring­ing some sta­bil­i­ty to South-West Sol­da­do, be­cause what the Mopo is do­ing, it is re­duc­ing sur­face pres­sure, some­thing sim­i­lar to what Cas­sia plat­form will do for bpTT, so the wells could flow and it is tak­ing the gas, com­press­ing it and re-in­ject­ing it for gas lift. That is even with­out drilling we will get ad­di­tion­al pro­duc­tion there and then we have a drilling pro­gramme planned for South-West.

“The whole is­sue here now is the eco­nom­ics be­cause as I keep say­ing, to be in this busi­ness you have to have deep pock­ets. The oil and gas busi­ness is not for the faint heart­ed, and when you go in­to a pok­er game you have to have bank, if you lose the first pot, you have to come again,” the En­er­gy Min­is­ter end­ed.