There is more en­cour­ag­ing news in the en­er­gy sec­tor as Paul Baay the Pres­i­dent and Chief Ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration com­pa­ny has re­vealed that the first gas from its Co­ho dis­cov­ery to flow in ear­ly May with pro­duc­tion from its Or­toire dis­cov­er­ies by the end of the year.

This ac­cord­ing to Baay will lead to an ad­di­tion of 100 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas to the na­tion­al pro­duc­tion, all of which will go in­to petro­chem­i­cals and elec­tric­i­ty.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian Baay said, “The first gas that we are look­ing at Or­toire would be ear­ly May and then the sec­ond phase that we are look­ing at, which is the sec­ond fa­cil­i­ty com­ing on stream would come on in ahh, we are hop­ing for the start of Au­gust time frame.

The first phase is about 10 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scf/d) and the sec­ond phase 60 mm­scf/d, get­ting ramped up to 90 mm­scf/d dur­ing 4th quar­ter, so by the end of the year about 100 mm­scf/d will be com­ing out of Or­toire.”

The news comes a week af­ter the coun­try’s largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er, bpTT, re­vealed the dis­ap­point­ing news that its pro­duc­tion in 2022 was like­ly to be a rel­a­tive­ly de­pressed 1,250 mm­scf/d com­pared to the 2 bil­lion cu­bic feet it has usu­al­ly pro­duced.

As re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly in last week’s Busi­ness Guardian 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.

The de­cline al­most mir­rors bpTT’s pro­duc­tion with it falling from Jan­u­ary when it was 1.525 bscf/d to 1.265 in No­vem­ber 2021.

But while bpTT is the ma­jor chal­lenge, since it is the largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er, Roy­al Dutch Shell con­tin­ues to pro­duce at rel­a­tive­ly low lev­els. From Jan­u­ary to No­vem­ber last year Shell’s pro­duc­tion av­er­aged 498 mm­scf/d.

Baay said the gas will com­prise of 10 mm­scf/d from Co­ho and the oth­er 90 mm­scf/d out of Cas­cadu­ra.

“It will be both cas­cadu­ra wells, the first cas­cadu­ra well will pro­duce about 55mm­scf/d and cas­cadu­ra deep will be about 35mm­scf/d.”

The com­pa­ny does not ex­pect to get con­den­sate out of its Co­ho well since it is dry gas but said at Cas­cadu­ra it is ex­pect­ing to pro­duce about 20 bar­rels per mm­scf/d so at 90mm­scf/d its rough­ly 1800 bar­rels of oil per day (bo/d) in con­den­sate. This will al­so as­sist the coun­try’s over­all crude pro­duc­tion.

It must be not­ed this is a new de­vel­op­ment and will be a net ad­di­tion to the coun­try’s oil and gas pro­duc­tion.

But the good news does not end there ac­cord­ing to Baay who said Touch­stone ex­pects that the pro­duc­tion out of Or­toire will be much more by the end of 2023.

“We are de­sign­ing the fa­cil­i­ty at Cas­cadu­ra for 200 mm­scf/d, so it will start at 60mm­scf/d, it will go to 90 mm­scf/d be­fore the end of the year and then with the ad­di­tion­al drilling we are go­ing to do lat­er this year and ear­ly next year we would see that fa­cil­i­ty get up to about 200mm­scf/d by the end of 2023.” Baay told the BG.

Jobs be­ing cre­at­ed

Baay said the de­vel­op­ment will lead to jobs be­ing cre­at­ed in the Rio Claro area with op­por­tu­ni­ties for op­er­at­ing both the Co­ho fa­cil­i­ty and the Cas­cadu­ra fa­cil­i­ty. There will al­so be a need for se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices, main­te­nance and op­er­a­tion. Baay es­ti­mates at least 28 peo­ple will be em­ployed.

Ma­jor oil find made

Baay said it ap­pears that the coun­try did not re­alise that the re­cent an­nounce­ment of an oil dis­cov­ery in its Roys­ton well was a ma­jor de­vel­op­ment in the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor.

He told BG “If you look at Pe­nal block, it has pro­duced over 100 mil­lion bar­rels of oil, and this is 1938 and it is ba­si­cal­ly a look alike to what we found at Roys­ton, like sim­i­lar depths, sim­i­lar type of crude so I am not sure peo­ple ful­ly un­der­stand how sig­nif­i­cant the Roys­ton dis­cov­ery was.”

Baay added, “I can on­ly tell you part of it be­cause we are in the mid­dle of do­ing an in­de­pen­dent en­gi­neer­ing re­port which will come out on March 14, but just from what we have seen from the seis­mic we have shot and the well we drilled, this is a struc­ture that is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 7km long and 2km wide and it holds hun­dreds of mil­lions of bar­rels of oil (in place) we know that now and what this is go­ing to mean is a very ac­tive drilling pro­gramme and I think sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of oil for the coun­try com­ing out of that block for the next cou­ple of years.”

He was asked about the ex­tent of the fault­ing in the area which has made Trinidad and To­ba­go no­to­ri­ous in its in­abil­i­ty to re­cov­er a lot of the oil it has dis­cov­ered with rates that range be­tween 5 per­cent and 10 per cent on-land and off­shore be­tween 15 and 20 per cent, when the glob­al stan­dard is of­ten over 40 per cent.

“There is, and that is one of the beau­ties that we have of the seis­mic. We have got re­al­ly good res­o­lu­tion on it, there are some big faults but that struc­ture over­all, it’s kind of the same, again if you look at Pe­nal/Bar­rack­pore it is split in­to, call it sev­en dif­fer­ent fields, but it is still all in that same hori­zon, in that same ge­ol­o­gy struc­ture. Roys­ton may end up be­ing that way where it is five or six dif­fer­ent fields but where it is over­all the oil we have en­coun­tered both in the over­thrust and in the in­ter­me­di­ate sheet are just fan­tas­tic, its beau­ti­ful low 38 Api oil, there is a huge de­vel­op­ment play on it, when I say hun­dreds of mil­lions of bar­rels, that’s oil in place so whether you want to put a 5 or 10 or 20 per­cent re­cov­ery fac­tor on it, it kind of gives you a re­cov­ery fac­tor.” Baay told BG.

Baay said when Touch­stone looked at the num­bers it is easy to see that the Roys­ton pool at its peak, some­time in the next cou­ple of years could pro­duce be­tween 10 to 12 thou­sand bar­rels of oil per day.

With prices strong Baay hopes by the end of year to start de­vel­op­ment drilling at Roys­ton and have at least three wells on pro­duc­tion by the end of this year and then start the re­al­ly ag­gres­sive drilling pro­gramme by 2023 and some­time in 2024 reach the peak rate of 10 to 12 thou­sand bar­rels of oil per day.

In­ter­est­ed in up­com­ing

bid rounds

“Yes for sure and there are some in­ter­est­ing acreage com­ing up, we be­lieve in that on­shore bid round, we think any­way, and we will be pur­su­ing them.” Bay told BG.

He was asked if he thought the trend was more gas prone or if there was sig­nif­i­cant oil to be found.

Baay said: “I think it is, as we found out with our lat­est dis­cov­ery at Roys­ton, it is oil and beau­ti­ful light oil. I think it is re­al­ly go­ing to de­pend on where you are in the trend, in the Her­rera trend, and the depth of the wells so, I think in what we are see­ing right now on the acreage that is com­ing up for bid, we will see it be­ing more oil than nat­ur­al gas.”