The Gov­ern­ment is in ad­vanced dis­cus­sions with Venezuela on cross-bor­der gas-shar­ing arrange­ments, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Nicole Olivierre said yes­ter­day, when she gave the fea­ture ad­dress at the open­ing of the So­ci­ety of Pe­tro­le­um En­gi­neers of T&T's (SPETT) 2016 En­er­gy and Re­sources Con­fer­ence and Ex­hi­bi­tion at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.

She said the Gov­ern­ment is mov­ing ag­gres­sive­ly to boost gas sup­ply to down­stream en­er­gy com­pa­nies by at­tempt­ing to fast-track dis­cus­sions with the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment and many agree­ments are at the stage of fi­nal­i­sa­tion or near com­ple­tion.

"The func­tion­al struc­ture and gov­er­nance for the op­er­a­tion of the Lo­ran-Man­a­tee unit area has been fi­nalised, and the com­pa­nies in­volved are close to fi­nal­i­sa­tion of the uni­ti­sa­tion and unit op­er­at­ing agree­ment. The com­pa­nies have al­so been asked to pre­pare a con­cep­tu­al de­vel­op­ment plan for the uni­tised field," she said.

Olivierre added Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro has agreed to col­lab­o­rate with the Gov­ern­ment on re­search and de­vel­op­ment of the po­ten­tial for cross-bor­der gas-shar­ing from oth­er fields.

Re­fer­ring to the mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing for tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial stud­ies of the nat­ur­al gas sup­ply through an in­ter­con­nec­tion from the Drag­on Field in Su­cre, north­east Venezuela, Olivierre said: "The field has re­serves es­ti­mat­ed at 2.6 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas, a por­tion of which will be made avail­able for pur­chase by Trinidad and To­ba­go. Joint tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial teams from each gov­ern­ment and the state en­ti­ties NGC and PDVSA have been ap­point­ed with a man­date to es­tab­lish the tech­ni­cal and eco­nom­ic fea­si­bil­i­ty of such gas sup­ply and to de­vel­op a busi­ness mod­el for its mon­eti­sa­tion."

She added that sim­i­lar dis­cus­sions have been ini­ti­at­ed with the gov­ern­ments of Guyana, Grena­da and Ghana, all with the aim of de­vel­op­ing eco­nom­ic ties, cre­at­ing cross-bor­der in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties and pro­vid­ing cap­tive mar­kets for T&T's en­er­gy ser­vice com­pa­nies.