BPTT has suf­fered an­oth­er ma­jor set­back as its long await­ed Cas­sia C project has been fur­ther de­layed and will not come on stream un­til the end of the year.

Cas­sia C is ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er over a quar­ter bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of low pres­sure nat­ur­al gas and is now to be de­layed by more than a year ac­cord­ing to high­ly placed sources at the com­pa­ny.

In an emailed re­sponse, BPTT con­firmed the fur­ther project de­lay, say­ing COVID-19 was re­spon­si­ble for its in­abil­i­ty to de­liv­er the nat­ur­al gas on time.

BPTT told the Busi­ness Guardian, “The hook up and com­mis­sion­ing phase of the Cas­sia C project is con­tin­u­ing and first gas is ex­pect­ed in the sec­ond half of the year. The project was ini­tial­ly planned to come on­line in 2021 but de­liv­ery was pushed to 2022 due to the im­pact of COVID-19.”

The com­pa­ny’s fail­ure to de­liv­er on its Cas­sia C project and its failed in­fill drilling pro­gramme have sig­nif­i­cant­ly hurt the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion and gov­ern­ment rev­enue.

It has al­so neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed every­thing from LNG out­put to the gas avail­able to the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor.

The lack of nat­ur­al gas from BPTT has al­so been the cause for the de­ci­sion to shut the Train 1 LNG plant as the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny Ltd (NGC) wast­ed more than a quar­ter bil­lion dol­lars be­hind Train 1, hop­ing it would have ac­cess to more gas that was not forth­com­ing.

BPTT has al­so not been able to meet its con­tract­ed oblig­a­tions and has been short­ing both At­lantic LNG and the NGC of nat­ur­al gas.

How­ev­er un­der its con­tract­ed agree­ment NGC has no re­course for BPTT’s fail­ure to pro­vide it with con­tract­ed quan­ti­ties al­though the NGC was forced to pay out huge sums to down­stream com­pa­nies for its fail­ure to pro­vide them with all the con­tract­ed quan­ti­ties of nat­ur­al gas.

1) Can BPTT say whether its Cas­sia project has been de­layed again to the end of the year?

2) If so what are the rea­sons for the de­lay?

3) How long has been the de­lay from the orig­i­nal start up time­line to the lat­est es­ti­mat­ed start up date?

4) How has this im­pact­ed BPTT’s abil­i­ty to de­liv­er gas to its cus­tomers?

5) What is ex­pect­ed to be the sus­tained pro­duc­tion of Cas­sia when it gets go­ing?

BPTT said, “Cas­sia C will de­liv­er be­tween 200-300 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of gas a day (mm­scf/d) and pro­duc­tion will be put to­wards ful­fill­ing our ex­ist­ing con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions.”

Sta­tis­tics from the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries clear­ly demon­strate the dele­te­ri­ous im­pact on the coun­try’s gas sup­ply that BPTT has been hav­ing over the last twelve years.

In 2010 when all the com­pa­nies were get­ting all the gas they need­ed, T&T’s av­er­age pro­duc­tion was 4.33 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bscf/d), of which BPTT pro­duced on av­er­age 2.565 bscf/d. Fast for­ward to 2018 and you would find BPTT’s pro­duc­tion fell to an av­er­age of 2.0 bscf/d, or by 500 mil­lion stan­dard feet per day (mm­scf/d), the re­sult was that T&T’s to­tal nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion fell by 700 mm­scf/d.

In 2019 BPTT’s pro­duc­tion dipped slight­ly to 1.9 bscf/d, so too did the coun­try’s pro­duc­tion which fell slight­ly to 3.588 bsc/d. But by last year BPTT’s pro­duc­tion plum­met­ed to 1.244 bscf/d and the coun­try’s over­all pro­duc­tion crashed to 2.579 bscf/d, a 1 bscf/d fall, of which BPTT was re­spon­si­ble for 70 per­cent of that drop off.

On­ly re­cent­ly BPTT con­firmed that this year it will pro­duce a mere 1.25 bscf/d, 750 mm­scf/d less than it had pro­duced on av­er­age in 2018.

The fig­ure is al­so sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than it told the Min­istry of En­er­gy in Ju­ly last year when it said that it would pro­duce 17 per cent less than orig­i­nal­ly fore­cast in 2020 and even that was down by 15 per cent from its pre­dic­tion in 2019.

In a con­fi­den­tial se­ries of doc­u­ments which the Busi­ness Guardian ob­tained, BPTT told the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion that go­ing for­ward it should ex­pect much low­er than fore­cast nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, with the short­fall be­ing 15 per cent in 2021 and over ten per cent un­til 2024.

The doc­u­ments showed that even that the Mat­a­pal and Cas­sia C projects that were ex­pect­ed to in­crease pro­duc­tion by about 140 (mm­scf/d), this is not go­ing to be the case.

The news ef­fec­tive­ly put to an end any thoughts that T&T could even av­er­age 3bscf/d in 2022, a fig­ure it was able to reach at the start of 2021, be­fore the pre­cip­i­tous falloff in BPTT’s pro­duc­tion.

The news could not be worse for Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert who should have been smil­ing these days with high com­mod­i­ty prices, but low pro­duc­tion has meant a ma­jor op­por­tu­ni­ty lost for ad­di­tion­al rev­enue and in par­tic­u­lar the earn­ing of scarce for­eign ex­change.

In re­sponse to ques­tions from the Busi­ness Guardian, BPTT said it end­ed 2021 av­er­ag­ing 1,250 mm­scf/d.

BPTT said, “We ex­pect pro­duc­tion for 2022 to be with­in the same range.”

The com­pa­ny blamed tech­ni­cal is­sues for the pre­cip­i­tous de­cline in pro­duc­tion in 2021 and it ad­mit­ted that even the com­ing on stream of its Cas­sia C project will on­ly hold pro­duc­tion in place.

“Dur­ing 2021 we ex­pe­ri­enced ac­cel­er­at­ed pro­duc­tion de­cline due to tech­ni­cal is­sues, which was par­tial­ly off­set when we brought Mat­a­pal on­to pro­duc­tion in Sep­tem­ber. For 2022, pro­duc­tion lev­els will be sup­port­ed by gas from Mat­a­pal, and the Cas­sia C de­vel­op­ment which is planned to come on­line in 3Q 2022.”

Ac­cord­ing to the lat­est fig­ures from the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries for the first 11 months of 2021 nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion av­er­aged 2.578 bscf/d with the pro­duc­tion of 2.385 bscf/d in No­vem­ber com­pared to 3.001 bscf/d in Jan­u­ary.

BPTT said it will con­tin­ue to in­vest in ef­forts to grow pro­duc­tion. It point­ed to the sanc­tion­ing of its joint project with EOG Re­sources, it al­so points to the re­turn to in­fill drilling as ex­am­ples of its ef­forts to im­prove pro­duc­tion.

“As we con­tin­ue to in­vest in pro­duc­tion gen­er­at­ing ac­tiv­i­ties in Trinidad, we were pleased to sanc­tion the EOG Op­er­at­ed Men­to de­vel­op­ment at the end of last year, the BHP Op­er­at­ed Ca­lyp­so de­vel­op­ment com­plet­ed ap­praisal well and BPTT plans to restart our in­fill drilling pro­gramme lat­er this year. We are al­so work­ing on a num­ber of fu­ture de­vel­op­ment op­tions for BPTT, in­clud­ing our next ma­jor project the Cypre de­vel­op­ment which we are hop­ing to sanc­tion this year,” BPTT said.

On the petro­chem­i­cal side where prices are high and the re­turns best for the Gov­ern­ment, the in­dus­try con­tin­ues to suf­fer from nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy fig­ures show am­mo­nia pro­duc­tion for the first 11 months of last year to­talling 4,481,698, be­low the 5.2 mil­lion met­ric tonnes ca­pac­i­ty.

Its methanol pro­duc­tions was 5.035 mil­lion met­ric tonnes.

With Train 1 dead T&T’s in­stalled LNG ca­pac­i­ty is un­der 2 bscf/d, for the first 12 months the av­er­age pro­duc­tion was a mere 1.256 bscf/d.

All of this points to con­tin­ued chal­lenges for gov­ern­ment and the econ­o­my.