Cur­tis Williams

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

BP the par­ent com­pa­ny of bpTT has an­nounced ma­jor changes in it glob­al busi­ness that will have ma­jor im­pli­ca­tions for Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The com­pa­ny has said it is not go­ing to ex­plore for hy­dro­car­bons in any new ju­ris­dic­tions. It will, in oth­er words, not look for oil or gas any­where that it does not al­ready op­er­ate.

The com­pa­ny in a sig­nif­i­cant state­ment of in­tent al­so in­di­cat­ed that it plans, by 2030, to re­duce its out­put of oil and gas by a whop­ping 40 per­cent and that it will re­duce its Cap­i­tal Ex­pen­di­ture to be­tween US $9 and $11 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly.

The ma­jor an­nounce­ment was made yes­ter­day as the com­pa­ny al­so re­vealed a loss of US $16.8 bil­lion for the sec­ond quar­ter of 2020 and slashed its div­i­dend pay­ment by 50 per­cent for the first since the Deep Hori­zon dis­as­ter in the Gulf of Mex­i­co.

The com­pa­ny had record­ed a US $1.8 bil­lion prof­it for the same pe­ri­od last year.

bp said it is all part of the move to be­come a net ze­ro car­bon emit­ter and as it trans­forms the busi­ness to en­sure sus­tain­abil­i­ty. It is al­so part of its con­tri­bu­tion to the fight against cli­mate change.

bp aid it was set­ting out a new strat­e­gy that will see it piv­ot from be­ing an in­ter­na­tion­al oil com­pa­ny fo­cused on pro­duc­ing re­sources to an in­te­grat­ed en­er­gy com­pa­ny fo­cused on de­liv­er­ing so­lu­tions for cus­tomers

The three pil­lars BP iden­ti­fied go­ing for­ward were low car­bon elec­tric­i­ty and en­er­gy . It plans to build scale in re­new­ables and bioen­er­gy, seek ear­ly po­si­tions in hy­dro­gen and build­ing out a cus­tomer gas port­fo­lio to com­ple­ment these low car­bon en­er­gies.

It wants to pro­vide its cus­tomers with con­ve­nience and mo­bil­i­ty by putting them at the heart of what bp does, help­ing ac­cel­er­ate the glob­al rev­o­lu­tion in mo­bil­i­ty, re­defin­ing the ex­pe­ri­ence of con­ve­nience re­tail, and scal­ing bp’s pres­ence and fu­el sales in growth mar­kets.

The third pil­lar is re­silient and fo­cused hy­dro­car­bons. To achieve this bp promis­es to main­tain ‘an ab­solute fo­cus on safe­ty and op­er­a­tional re­li­a­bil­i­ty, we in­tend to con­tin­ue to high-grade the port­fo­lio, re­sult­ing in sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er and more com­pet­i­tive pro­duc­tion and re­fin­ing through­put.’

But what does this mean for T&T? Well ac­cord­ing to bpTT’s Vice Pres­i­dent Cor­po­rate Op­er­a­tions, Giselle Thomp­son the com­pa­ny re­mains com­mit­ted to its op­er­a­tions in T&T, in­clud­ing main­tain­ing it 2 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day which it pro­duces and for which it has con­trac­tu­al arrange­ments.

She ac­knowl­edges that the re­duc­tion in Capex means that T&T will have to fight for in­vest­ment even hard­er than it did in the past but said the lo­cal busi­ness is well po­si­tioned to at­tract not just in­vest­ment in tra­di­tion­al en­er­gy but in new en­er­gy like re­new­ables.

She ad­mit­ted that the 2018 an­nounced US$5 bil­lion in­vest­ment in T&T in five years were for some projects that have not been sanc­tioned and will have to now face the hur­dle of less CAPEX be­ing avail­able.

Thomp­son point­ed to the part­ner­ship with Light­source and Shell to bring the coun­try’s first large scale re­new­able en­er­gy project as an ex­am­ple of what might be pos­si­ble in the fu­ture.

bpTT’s Vice Pres­i­dent Cor­po­rate Op­er­a­tions said things are chang­ing glob­al­ly and bp wants to be part of the so­lu­tion that leads to clean­er en­er­gy and has set var­i­ous tar­gets to re­duce emis­sion.

She said the fo­cused will now be on cus­tomers rather than man­ag­ing re­sources.

Thomp­son ex­plained that ex­pen­di­ture in oil and gas will be on high per­form­ing ex­ist­ing basins and in places like T&T where bp has a sig­nif­i­cant foot­print.

She in­sist­ed nat­ur­al gas re­mains an im­por­tant fu­el and the com­pa­ny was not turn­ing its back on oil and gas and Trinidad re­mains well placed in the glob­al port­fo­lio.

There will be job loss­es as the or­gan­i­sa­tion in­tends to shed 10,000 em­ploy­ees glob­al­ly, with the on­ly peo­ple ring fenced are those di­rect­ly in­volved in the op­er­a­tions. How many will loose their jobs in T&T? Thomp­son could not give a num­ber as all of that will be worked out by the end of the year.