En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan has made a bold pre­dic­tion that by 2025 crude oil pro­duc­tion will in­crease to 92,000 bar­rels of oil per day (bopd), up from its present pro­duc­tion of 57,000 bopd.

The min­is­ter said this pro­ject­ed in­crease does not take in­to ac­count any ad­di­tion­al ma­jor dis­cov­ery that may be made in the in­ter­ven­ing pe­ri­od and which may quick­ly be brought in­to pro­duc­tion.

Khan would no doubt have based part of his pre­dic­tion on the al­ready sanc­tioned BHP Ru­by project which at peak will add 16,000 bopd and the abil­i­ty of state-owned Her­itage to in­crease its pro­duc­tion based on its sig­nif­i­cant and un­der utilised as­sets.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia Khan al­lud­ed to the po­ten­tial of Her­itage and said, “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 where 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.”

All of this sounds im­pres­sive and makes sense. For years, al­most two decades to be hon­est, en­er­gy min­is­ters have promised to do some­thing about de­clin­ing pro­duc­tion on land and on the West Coast. Noth­ing has ac­tu­al­ly worked.

For­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine, like Khan, had made a bold promise of in­creased oil pro­duc­tion, main­ly led by what was the then Petrotrin.

Ram­nar­ine in 2011 told a meet­ing of the En­er­gy Cham­ber; “As a coun­try, we must move quick­ly to max­imise on the high oil prices both from a WTI and Brent per­spec­tive. The min­istry’s fore­cast­ing of oil pro­duc­tion in­di­cates that oil pro­duc­tion which av­er­aged around 94,000 bopd for Jan­u­ary to Oc­to­ber 2011 should edge back up to­wards the 100,000 bopd mark in 2012.”

He al­so had this to say on nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, “There con­tin­ues to be a short­age of nat­ur­al gas to the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al es­tate. This prob­lem is not due to a lack of re­serves. It is a re­sult of poor co­or­di­na­tion. The Min­istry of En­er­gy start­ing Jan­u­ary 2012 will be chair­ing a quar­ter­ly pro­duc­tion op­ti­mi­sa­tion meet­ing that will en­sure that this nev­er hap­pens again. In terms of a so­lu­tion, there is light at the end of the tun­nel.

“We ex­pect that the EOG Tou­can Plat­form would com­mence pro­duc­tion in mid Jan­u­ary to mid Feb­ru­ary and that this would pro­vide re­lief to the prob­lem at Point Lisas.

“The NGC has al­so com­menced works on the NGC pipeline net­work to en­sure that we have more flex­i­bil­i­ty in the de­liv­er­abil­i­ty of nat­ur­al gas. This in­volves con­nect­ing BG at Beach­field in­to the NGC do­mes­tic grid.

We must un­der­stand that the sys­tem of sup­ply and de­mand for nat­ur­al gas is tight­ly op­ti­mised and any dis­rup­tion will now be im­me­di­ate­ly felt at Point Lisas. I will al­so add that new de­vel­op­ments of nat­ur­al gas have proven to “dry gas” and there­fore we have a com­men­su­rate de­cline in the pro­duc­tion of liq­uids in T&T. This places even greater em­pha­sis on get­ting oil pro­duc­tion back up above 100,000 bopd.”

His­to­ry has shown that on both counts Ram­nar­ine and the Min­istry of En­er­gy failed to de­liv­er.

I make the point about Ram­nar­ine to say that it is eas­i­er said than done and that in­creased oil pro­duc­tion from Her­itage will re­quire sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment of hard cash, some­thing the coun­try does not have and Her­itage is short on.

To be clear, the com­pa­ny has de­clared sig­nif­i­cant prof­its but when one con­sid­ers the costs of wells and the risks as­so­ci­at­ed with drilling then one un­der­stands that Her­itage is go­ing to re­quire ei­ther sig­nif­i­cant joint ven­tures or a dif­fer­ent ap­proach has to be tak­en to al­low pri­vate cap­i­tal ac­cess to the oil re­sources now un­der the con­trol of the state.

With the cli­mate change chal­lenge fac­ing the world and the move away from fos­sil fu­el and in par­tic­u­lar liq­uid fu­els, the coun­try has to be fo­cused on mov­ing quick­ly to get the oil out of the ground or risk hav­ing a prod­uct that no one wants.

Crude oil and nat­ur­al gas are on­ly im­por­tant based on the val­ue of the prod­uct and most ex­perts feel there is a win­dow with­in which they will re­main rel­e­vant.

The an­nounce­ment by the world’s lead­ing car mak­ers of their move away from the pro­duc­tion of com­bus­tion en­gines by be­tween 2030 and 2040, if suc­cess­ful, will deal a hefty blow to oil prices and pro­duc­tion and even now there is re­al doubt about oil and gas ma­jors in­vest­ing in any new search for crude, un­less that oil can be dis­cov­ered quick­ly and sold in­to the mar­ket for prof­it.

It is why the fail­ure of this gov­ern­ment to act quick­ly in the en­er­gy sec­tor to solve the myr­i­ad of prob­lems fac­ing it is in­ex­plic­a­ble and tan­ta­mount to po­lit­i­cal mal­prac­tice.

This col­umn has been on the record on call­ing for Khan to be re­placed as the En­er­gy Min­is­ter, and it is to his cred­it that he was pre­pared to sit down with Guardian Me­dia and have a frank dis­cus­sion about his tenure as the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and ex­plain his side of why things are where they are.

In the in­ter­view Khan al­so promised by 2025 the nat­ur­al gas short­age that Ram­nar­ine spoke about in 2011 will be fi­nal­ly solved. Four­teen years lat­er and with sev­er­al petro­chem­i­cal plants al­ready gone.

As a coun­try we have to wish Khan good luck. We need the rev­enue that can be gen­er­at­ed by the en­er­gy sec­tor and we need to get the oil and gas out of the ground quick­ly and in­vest it in ar­eas that will lead to sus­tain­able rev­enue streams in­to the fu­ture.

We have al­ready lost bil­lions due to LNG trans­fer pric­ing that nei­ther the PNM nor UNC seem to have a prob­lem with and one can on­ly hope this time we get it right in the im­por­tant, but sun­set sec­tor.

We are run­ning out of time and while Khan and this gov­ern­ment say the right things, their ac­tions fail to back up their promis­es.

Those who felt we would be well on our way to herd im­mu­ni­ty by now, see how old talk and bas­ket doh hold wa­ter.