Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has again got­ten his nat­ur­al gas fig­ures wrong, this time for fis­cal year 2021.

The Busi­ness Guardian can con­firm that based on fig­ures from the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, the av­er­age nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion for T&T for fis­cal 2021 was clos­er to 2.6 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bscf/d)and not the 2.77 bscf/d Im­bert told the Par­lia­ment just over a month ago.

In de­liv­er­ing his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion for the fis­cal year 2022, Im­bert told the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives: “We are sta­bil­is­ing our oil and con­den­sate as well as gas pro­duc­tion: nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion which de­creased in 2020 is pro­ject­ed to rise in 2021 to 2.77 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet and in 2022 to 3.37 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet and there­after to sta­bilise at 3.60 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet.”

This is sim­ply not true and based on the Min­istry of En­er­gy’s own da­ta, im­pos­si­ble to achieve.

On No­vem­ber 5, months af­ter it was due, and long af­ter com­ple­tion of the bud­get de­bate in the Par­lia­ment, the Min­istry of En­er­gy fi­nal­ly re­leased the pro­duc­tion fig­ures up to Ju­ly 2021.

When one takes in­to ac­count the re­port­ed pro­duc­tion fig­ures from Oc­to­ber 2020 to Ju­ly 2021, the first ten months of the 2021 fis­cal year, the av­er­age pro­duc­tion was 2.616 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day, well be­low the 2.77 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day pre­dict­ed by the Fi­nance Min­is­ter. A dai­ly short­fall of 177 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet (mm­scf/d).

To get to the 2.77 bscf/d the BG cal­cu­lates it would have re­quired pro­duc­tion in Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber to av­er­age 3.539 bscf/d. This did not oc­cur. In fact the nat­ur­al gas con­straints have grown even worse over the last two months with at least two of the largest up­stream nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­ers hav­ing chal­lenges.

The Busi­ness Guardian has been told that both At­lantic LNG and the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor are hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant cur­tail­ment is­sues at present.

To put it in­to con­text the 177 mm­scf/d short­fall would have been enough to sup­ply the largest methanol plant in the coun­try, which is one of the largest in the world.

It would have al­so been enough gas to per­haps keep At­lantic LNG Train 1 in op­er­a­tions and save the NGC’s blush­es and a quar­ter bil­lion loss on its failed at­tempt to save Train 1.

The lat­est fig­ures al­so show a wor­ry­ing de­crease, al­most for the en­tire year of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion. A clos­er ex­am­i­na­tion of the num­bers show that in Jan­u­ary nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion was 3 bscf/d this fell off al­most every month with Feb­ru­ary 2.85 bscf/d, in March it de­clined to 2.773 bscf/d and by Ju­ly it av­er­aged a pal­try 2.394 bscf/d.

The main rea­son for the short­fall is the con­tin­ued weak pro­duc­tion from bpTT which up to Ju­ly av­er­aged in cal­en­der 2021, 1.268 bscf/d, a far cry from the 2 bscf/d it did from 2010 to 2020.

The fig­ure is in keep­ing with the se­cret bpTT doc­u­ments which the Busi­ness Guardian pub­lished show­ing the pro­jec­tions of low pro­duc­tion for the en­tire 2021 and re­vised down­ward pro­jec­tions for sev­er­al years to come.

The com­pa­ny has since tried to walk back its own pro­jec­tions say­ing it was sub­ject to change.

But bpTT’s woes are not the on­ly one fac­ing the up­stream sec­tor as the fig­ures al­so show that Roy­al Dutch Shell con­tin­ues to strug­gle and its pro­duc­tion fig­ures have re­mained around to 500 mm­scf/d mark. A far cry from when the com­pa­ny was pro­duc­ing clos­er to one bcf/d. EOG re­sources pro­duc­tion fig­ures are al­so down and while the com­pa­ny has in the past been a con­sis­tent sup­pli­er of nat­ur­al gas, av­er­ag­ing clos­er to 500 mm­scf/d, its pro­duc­tion in cal­en­der 2021 has av­er­aged 363 mm­scf/d.

As per­haps can be ex­pect­ed the fig­ures al­so show con­strained pro­duc­tion in all the petro­chem­i­cals and in At­lantic LNG.

It al­so demon­strates that there was no pro­duc­tion out of At­lantic LNG train 1 and that the com­bined Trains two and three, where gov­ern­ment does not have a stake, had mar­gin­al­ly high­er pro­duc­tion num­bers than Train 4 which is al­most equiv­a­lent as the com­bined Trains 2 and 3, in terms of ca­pac­i­ty.