Cur­tis Williams

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

An ex­plo­ration well drilled by bpTT and EOG re­sources has dis­cov­ered one tril­lion cu­bic feet of gross nat­ur­al gas re­sources, off the East Coast, off Trinidad ac­cord­ing to doc­u­ments from both com­pa­nies.

Con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments from bpTT which Guardian Me­dia has copies of and which were pre­sent­ed re­cent­ly to the Gov­ern­ment, show that the dis­cov­ery was made.

The bpTT doc­u­ment sim­ply point to a dis­cov­ery in the well named Men­to. bpTT’s doc­u­ment read, “Men­to well dis­cov­ery in Feb­ru­ary 2020 with part­ner EOG. Post well analy­sis com­plet­ed.”

How­ev­er, EOG re­sources Q2 fi­nan­cial re­sults not on­ly cor­rob­o­rate the dis­cov­ery, but pro­vides fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on the size.

The com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial re­sults show that the dis­cov­ery was one TCF of gross re­source po­ten­tial with 500 bil­lion cu­bic feet (bcf) of net nat­ur­al gas re­sources.

The well was start­ed on Jan­u­ary 2, 2020 and was drilled to a to­tal depth of 14,769 feet.

While a dis­cov­ery would have had to be re­vealed to the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Re­sources, it was nev­er an­nounced to the coun­try.

The con­fi­den­tial bpTT doc­u­ments al­so show that a de­ci­sion will be made in the fourth quar­ter to this year, on whether to sanc­tion the de­vel­op­ment of the well.

Mean­while, EOG re­sources has been earn­ing in 2021 sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er prices for its nat­ur­al gas pro­duced in T&T than it did last year, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial state­ments for the sec­ond quar­ter 2021.

The fi­nan­cial state­ments for the sec­ond quar­ter re­vealed that EOG has earned an av­er­age of US$3.37 per mil­lion, stan­dard cu­bic feet (mm­scf). This com­pares favourably to 2020 when the com­pa­ny earned an av­er­age of US$2.35 per mm­scf and high­er than 2019 which was US $2.13 per mm­scf.

The price is high­er than the com­pa­ny had ini­tial­ly ex­pect­ed to earn from its sale in T&T and with in­creased pro­duc­tion EOG’s earn­ings form its T&T out­fit ap­pears to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proved com­pared to last year.

EOG sells all of its nat­ur­al gas in­to the Na­tion­al Gas com­pa­ny. This ef­fec­tive­ly means that the NGC has been pay­ing high­er prices to EOG for its nat­ur­al gas in 2021.

This, how­ev­er, un­like­ly re­flects a hit on the NGC since most of the gas is like­ly re­lat­ed to the price of petro­chem­i­cals.

This year com­mod­i­ty prices have been high­er than last year as glob­al economies be­gin to emerge from the im­pact of covid-19.

EOG’s ac­counts al­so show that it has pro­duced an av­er­age of 223 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scf/d) for the sec­ond quar­ter this year. This is more than ten per cent high­er than the com­pa­ny ex­pect­ed to pro­duce in 2021 and it is 80 mm­scf/d more than it pro­duced a year ago that 45 mm­scf/d more than its av­er­age out­put in the fourth quar­ter last year.