Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

BPTT’s re­gion­al pres­i­dent Claire Fitz­patrick has ex­pressed that BP is still work­ing on fill­ing the gap in gas pro­duc­tion af­ter its failed in­fill drilling pro­gramme ear­li­er this year.

Speak­ing at BPTT’s tech­nol­o­gy open house Fitz­patrick said: “In terms of our de­clines, a lot of the work we are do­ing here is around mak­ing sure we can max­imise the pro­duc­tion.”

Fitz­patrick said that whether max­imis­ing pro­duc­tion comes through the util­i­sa­tion of its new tech­nolo­gies, the com­pa­ny has an ob­jec­tive of en­sur­ing that it can meet its ex­ist­ing con­trac­tu­al com­mit­ments. Ref­er­enc­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion dur­ing the event, Fitz­patrick re­it­er­at­ed that gas de­clines quite quick­ly.

“A lot of the op­ti­mi­sa­tion work is around how do we mit­i­gate and slow the rate of that de­cline?”

Fitz­patrick con­tin­ued to say the gap in gas pro­duc­tion that was cre­at­ed by the failed in­fill drilling pro­gramme is “not go­ing to close...in the near term.

“Our next ma­jor projects we start to bring in are Cas­sia Com­pres­sion, comes in 2022, Mat­a­pal al­so comes in 2022 and you saw that the Cypre pre­sen­ta­tion—that’s look­ing like the end of 2022, 2023, sub­ject to suc­cess­ful FID (fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion) next year.”

In May of this year, the dis­ap­point­ing re­sults that BPTT re­ceived from their in­fill drilling pro­grammes have tan­gi­bly im­pact­ed their pre­dict­ed gas pro­duc­tion.

The com­pa­ny said the news will im­pact out­put, es­pe­cial­ly in 2020 and 2021.

BPTT al­so said ear­li­er this year, there were chal­lenges to their sup­ply of gas to At­lantic LNG’s Train 1 af­ter 2019.

Fitz­patrick added that share­hold­ers are still hav­ing dis­cus­sions con­cern­ing the fu­ture of At­lantic LNG.

“In terms of Train 1 it­self, share­hold­ers con­tin­ue to have con­ver­sa­tions, it’s a dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing de­ci­sion on fund­ing main­te­nance ac­tiv­i­ties with­out know­ing how you are go­ing to re­cov­er that in­vest­ment,” she said. Nev­er­the­less, Fitz­patrick not­ed that all the share­hold­ers have a de­sire to keep Train 1 up for many rea­sons.

“If you have an un­planned out­age at one of the oth­er plants, hav­ing ca­pac­i­ty to swing gas means that we are help­ing keep the pro­duc­tion lev­els up from a coun­try per­spec­tive as well for the in­di­vid­ual com­pa­nies.”

Con­cern­ing the use of tech­nol­o­gy, Fitz­patrick said: “We at BP are com­mit­ted to de­ploy­ing the best avail­able tech­nolo­gies in­to our busi­ness and to con­tin­ue to use the best minds to de­liv­er en­er­gy now and in the fu­ture.”

She said the com­pa­ny is chang­ing the way it works to be­come more ef­fi­cient, to in­crease pro­duc­tion and to ad­vance the en­er­gy tran­si­tion.