Cur­tis Williams

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

State-owned Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um ex­pects to in­crease its crude oil pro­duc­tion by 80 per­cent over the next four years ac­cord­ing to its Chief Ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Ar­lene Chow.

Speak­ing yes­ter­day at day one of the En­er­gy Cham­ber’s En­er­gy con­fer­ence 2021, Chow ex­plained that the time had come for the com­pa­ny to get its re­serves out of the ground.

She said, “In our pro­jec­tions we will have 50 per cent growth based on the plan I have shown you, in pro­duc­tion in our op­er­at­ed as­sets, and along with out LO (Le­asse Op­er­a­tors) and FO (farm outs) and in our to­tal bar­rels of 80 per cent in the next five years....How will we do this? In­crease in cap­i­tal spend with a fo­cus on base sta­bil­i­sa­tion and in or­gan­ic growth to re­duce the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of ex­ist­ing re­sources. We need to get the oil out of the ground.”

If this is achieved it will take Her­itage’s pro­duc­tion in ex­cess of 60,000 bar­rels of oil per day and T&T back over 100,000 bo/d. Not seen since 2011.

Chow said the strat­e­gy has al­ways been a pro­duc­tion dri­ven one for part­ner­ing, ex­ploit­ing low hang­ing val­ue that may have been missed in the past or re­quired a new ap­proach, for ex­am­ple Ju­bilee field that has one bil­lion bar­rels of heavy oil.

She ex­plained the ra­tio­nale say­ing, “Part­ner­ing for val­ue is an im­por­tant as­pect of be­ing an NOC (Na­tion­al Oil com­pa­ny) in these en­er­gy tran­si­tion times, and it was al­ways an ear­ly strate­gic goal and re­mains im­por­tant be­cause the im­per­a­tives around CAPEX (cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture), we need CAPEX, we need ex­plo­ration, we need tech­nol­o­gy, and com­pe­ten­cy, some of which we need to get from our part­ners.

Our first ex­plo­ration well which we will be do­ing is a joint ven­ture with EOG in the South West Sol­da­do and it is a huge farm in area, so we ex­pect that EOG to­geth­er with us will spud the first well at the end of 2021 and we are hop­ing for a very good re­sult from this as we move for­ward.”

Chow said the EOG well is one of sev­er­al ex­plo­ration wells to be drilled in Her­itage’s acreage in­clud­ing wells in the East Field, North Field and Main Field in the next two to three years.

“On land we have de­vel­oped a sol­id hop­per of six to nine wells for the next five years. We are restart­ing our EOR projects and re­view­ing new EOR projects as well.” the Her­itage CEO ex­plained.

She said Her­itage was look­ing at in­no­v­a­tive ways to ex­ploit its re­serves and ac­cel­er­ate pro­duc­tion as nec­es­sary.