Sto­ries by Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Ex­pect a new deep wa­ter bid round ear­ly next year, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan has an­nounced.

Khan made the state­ment yes­ter­day dur­ing the con­tract sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the gas sales agree­ment be­tween the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny and Block 3 (a) con­sor­tium for the Ru­by Field.

Khan al­so took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­plain why the gov­ern­ment did not have a deep wa­ter bid dur­ing its five-year tenure.

“And see­ing that this is the sea­son I just want to say some­thing that has been on the press for some time with re­gards by a for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter that this ad­min­is­tra­tion has not pro­posed any bid round over its five-year pe­ri­od,” Khan said.

“I would like the gen­tle­man to know and the coun­try to know you don’t just ups and have a bid round,” he said.

Khan said there are two cri­te­ria for a bid round.

“One, it must be li­censed acreage so as min­is­ter of en­er­gy I can­not have a bid round on­shore in the south­ern basin be­cause all the acreage, by and large, is un­der li­cense,” he said.

“Nor can I have a bid round in the Gulf of Paria be­cause the Gulf of Paria, by and large, in the prospec­tive acreage is un­der li­cence,” Khan said.

“It is very dif­fi­cult to have a shal­low wa­ter bid round be­cause most of the acreage is un­der li­cence and would have made ab­solute­ly no sense to come out with a par­al­lel deep wa­ter bid round while BHP was in­volved in some se­ri­ous ex­plo­ration,” Khan said.

Khan said he be­lieves be­cause of BHP’s ex­plo­ration suc­cess when the bid round is held next year it will at­tract greater in­ter­na­tion­al in­ter­est.

“So you don’t just ups and do these things ad ho­cly or su­per­fi­cial­ly you do them with a plan,” Khan said.

The Ru­by Field is lo­cat­ed in Block 3(a), off the east coast of Trinidad, and is ex­pect­ed to be com­mis­sioned in the fourth quar­ter of 2021.

“This is just one step that both NGC and BHP have tak­en to se­cure gas sup­ply by con­tin­u­ing to in­vest in up­stream gas de­vel­op­ment projects,” the En­er­gy Min­istry stat­ed.

BHP is the op­er­a­tor of the block, with NGC, through its sub­sidiary NGC E&P (Nether­lands) BV as part­ners.

The project was sanc­tioned in Au­gust 2019, cul­mi­nat­ing from de­ci­sions tak­en af­ter gath­er­ing and analysing da­ta ac­quired dur­ing ex­plo­ration and ap­praisal drilling, and state-of-the-art ocean bot­tom node seis­mic sur­vey­ing.

The Ru­by project will com­prise of five de­vel­op­ment wells and one plat­form pro­duc­ing from the Ru­by and Delaware fields in Block 3(a).

Pro­duc­tion from this Block will tie-in to ad­ja­cent in­fra­struc­ture in Block 2(c) re­sult­ing in syn­er­gies for both blocks. The Ru­by project’s ex­pect­ed pro­duc­tion is 15,000 bar­rels per day of crude oil along with 85 MM­scfd of gas pro­duc­tion.

“To put this in­to per­spec­tive, the lat­ter is suf­fi­cient to sup­ply a large-scale am­mo­nia or methanol plant which would nor­mal­ly use be­tween 40 to 100 MM­scfd de­pend­ing on the plant’s out­put,” the en­er­gy min­istry stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to Vin­cent Pereira, pres­i­dent of BHP T&T, “The sign­ing of this gas sales agree­ment with the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny re­flects BHP’s con­tin­ued com­mit­ment to T&T and to pro­vid­ing a re­li­able source of gas to NGC.

“This is an­oth­er demon­stra­tion of our firm’s com­mit­ment to sus­tain­ably grow­ing our busi­ness in here.”

Ac­cord­ing to NGC pres­i­dent, Mark Lo­quan, “NGC con­tin­ues in its thrust to grow our busi­ness and cre­ate val­ue for our share­hold­er by in­te­grat­ing along the gas val­ue chain.

“These de­vel­op­ments are im­por­tant mile­stones for NGC as we strive to ful­fil our vi­sion to be a recog­nised glob­al leader in the de­vel­op­ment of sus­tain­able en­er­gy-re­lat­ed busi­ness­es by de­vel­op­ing strate­gic part­ner­ships and cre­at­ing ex­cep­tiona val­ue.”