As a pre­dom­i­nant­ly oil and gas econ­o­my T&T must and will ac­cel­er­ate the ex­plo­ration and de­vel­op­ment of its hy­dro­car­bon re­sources or run the risk of the re­sources be­com­ing strand­ed.

To this end, the En­er­gy Min­istry will be of­fer­ing a shal­low wa­ter bid round, an on­shore bid round and a deep wa­ter bid round over the next 12 months, said En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young.

He ex­plained that the Deep Wa­ter Com­pet­i­tive Bid Round is sched­uled to be launched in Q3 2021, where pos­si­bly as many as 11 deep-wa­ter blocks will be avail­able for bid­ding.

Speak­ing at the T&T Sec­tion of the So­ci­ety of Pe­tro­le­um En­gi­neers (SPETT) In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Re­sources Con­fer­ence and Ex­hi­bi­tion yes­ter­day, Young said dur­ing re­cent deep-wa­ter ex­plo­ration, the largest 3D ma­rine seis­mic sur­vey in the west­ern hemi­sphere was ac­quired, not­ing that this dataset has been re­fined through sev­er­al pro­cess­ing and re­pro­cess­ing ef­forts and cov­ers some of the blocks be­ing pro­posed for the bid round.

“In ad­di­tion to this dataset, we al­so have var­i­ous mul­ti-client 2D sur­veys avail­able over our deep wa­ter acreage and ex­ten­sive well da­ta.

“The com­pre­hen­sive seis­mic dataset and well da­ta will al­low for an in-depth eval­u­a­tion of the po­ten­tial of the pro­posed deep-wa­ter blocks,” Young added.

He said re­cent deep-wa­ter ex­plo­ration has been suc­cess­ful in iden­ti­fy­ing nat­ur­al gas re­sources of ap­prox­i­mate­ly six tril­lion cu­bic feet.

“We ex­pect that this bid round will con­tin­ue in the same vein based on es­ti­mat­ed un­risked prospec­tive gas re­sources of 6.6 tril­lion cu­bic feet in the open deep-wa­ter blocks,” Young said.

He said an on­shore com­pet­i­tive bid round will fol­low the deep wa­ter com­pet­i­tive bid round, adding that the re­cent suc­cess­es on­shore by Touch­stone and Chal­lenger En­er­gy Group have served to con­firm that great po­ten­tial still ex­ists on­shore.

There has been sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est in on­shore acreage by both po­ten­tial in­vestors as well as cur­rent op­er­a­tors, Young said.

He said in Ju­ly 2020, Her­itage is­sued an EOI to glob­al and lo­cal en­er­gy com­pa­nies to ex­press their in­ter­est in a joint ven­ture to ex­plore the deep­er per­spec­tive of its north west dis­trict.

The min­is­ter said three IOCs were short­list­ed and a pre­ferred part­ner will be se­lect­ed by the end of 2021.

“The min­istry in­tends to build on such in­ter­est and will be of­fer­ing sev­er­al blocks in the on­shore bid-round. Ex­ten­sive 2D and 3D datasets and well da­ta are avail­able to en­able the eval­u­a­tion of the blocks,” Young added.

A Shal­low Wa­ter Com­pet­i­tive Bid Round will fol­low the on­shore com­pet­i­tive bid round and is tar­get­ed for 2022, he said.

In ac­cel­er­at­ing the ex­plo­ration of its hy­dro­car­bon po­ten­tial T&T will be fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of over 20 coun­tries that have been pro­mot­ing new ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion through li­cens­ing rounds and con­clud­ing new up­stream pe­tro­le­um con­tracts dur­ing 2020 and 2021.

Young al­so said that in par­al­lel with the ini­ti­a­tion of new ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ty, T&T must al­so ac­cel­er­ate the de­vel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of iden­ti­fied 3P and con­tin­gent oil and gas re­sources.

He added that the lat­est au­dit of the crude oil re­serves and re­sources un­der­tak­en by Nether­land, Sewell and As­so­ciates, In­cor­po­rat­ed and the nat­ur­al gas re­serves and re­sources au­dit un­der­tak­en by Ry­der Scott es­tab­lished that T&T pos­sess­es sub­stan­tial oil and gas re­sources.