A deep wa­ter bid round is ex­pect­ed to take place be­fore the end of this year, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan has said.

And the pro­longed ne­go­ti­a­tion with bpTT and Shell on the blocks they bid on in last year’s shal­low wa­ter bid round may soon come to an end, he said.

Khan made the state­ments yes­ter­day as the re­sults of the an­nu­al au­dit of the non-as­so­ci­at­ed nat­ur­al gas re­serves and re­sources of Trinidad and To­ba­go for the year end­ed 2019 was re­leased.

So far the gov­ern­ment has not had a deep wa­ter bid since be­ing vot­ed in­to of­fice in 2015.

Khan said now that BHP has re­lin­quished acreage he feels now would be a bet­ter time for the bid round.

“To have a bid round you must have acreage to bid. In terms of the shal­low wa­ter, most of the shal­low wa­ter acreage and most of the shal­low wa­ter prospec­tive acreage are al­ready un­der li­cense so the re­al up­side po­ten­tial lies in the deep wa­ter but it would have made no sense to come out with a par­al­lel deep wa­ter bid round when we were in the throes of a suc­cess­ful deep wa­ter pro­gramme,” Khan said.

“Now that pro­gramme is com­plet­ed we have now classed the da­ta and we have made an im­por­tant in­ter­ven­tion here we have now agreed with BHP for the de­clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the deep wa­ter da­ta so all the seis­mic and all the well in­for­ma­tion will now be pack­aged and added to which BHP will now be re­lin­quish­ing acreage they do not want be­cause that is part of the PSC (pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tract) af­ter the ex­plo­ration pe­ri­od you have to re­lin­quish acreage that you do not plan to de­vel­op,” he said.

“So now we are in a po­si­tion to have re­lin­quished BHP acreage which in a sense will be ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly close to the dis­cov­er­ies and it will have im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion both from its well in­for­ma­tion and its seis­mic pro­gramme bear­ing in mind that BHP at the point in time ran the largest deep wa­ter seis­mic sur­vey in the world,” Khan said.

Khan said with the added da­ta the gov­ern­ment can now have a deep wa­ter bid round.

He, how­ev­er, stat­ed that deep wa­ter is the most ex­pen­sive part of ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion.

“It is not shal­low wa­ter it is not on­shore so it calls for sig­nif­i­cant cap­i­tal, all over the world in­ter­na­tion­al ma­jors are con­strained with cap­i­tal so pos­si­bly now is not the time to go out to the mar­ket but hav­ing said that we will be in a tech­ni­cal­ly good po­si­tion to go back out with a deep wa­ter bid round in the lat­ter part of this year,” Khan said.

Khan said he be­lieves the bid round will be “quite at­trac­tive.”

With re­spect to the shal­low wa­ter bid round Khan said it is close to come to an end.

In 2019 a shal­low wa­ter bid round for new acreage was held.

The bid round, closed with BP and Shell, the two ma­jor ex­ist­ing gas pro­duc­ers in T&T joint­ly bid­ding on three of the six blocks on of­fer.

The joint BP and Shell bids were re­ceived for the three east coast blocks on of­fer, with no oth­er bids be­ing re­ceived for the blocks. No bids were re­ceived for the two blocks off Trinidad’s north coast and for the one block on of­fer in the Gulf of Paria.

“The shal­low wa­ter bid round did not of­fer the most prospec­tive acreage in the world I would be the first to ad­mit. A lot of that acreage was al­ready re­lin­quished acreage from oth­er com­pa­nies so the ge­o­log­ic po­ten­tial of that acreage was not as high as some oth­er acreage how­ev­er when the po­ten­tial is not high the bid will not be at­trac­tive,” Khan said.

“So we are try­ing to jug­gle a way to see what Shell and BP bid­ded and to see if they can pos­si­bly meet prob­a­bly the low­est hur­dle that the min­istry would as­sign be­fore we award the acreage. There has been a lot of dis­cus­sion back and forth, the struc­ture of the con­tract and oth­er fis­cal is­sues and I know it has tak­en some time but we are com­ing very close to the end of that ex­er­cise,” he said. (JJ)