“The game is chang­ing and there­fore Trinidad will have to change with it.”

This was the com­ment made the En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan yes­ter­day as he re­spond­ed to re­cent de­vel­op­ments tak­ing place in BP the par­ent com­pa­ny of bpTT.

BP has said it is not go­ing to ex­plore for hy­dro­car­bons in any new ju­ris­dic­tions.

The com­pa­ny in a sig­nif­i­cant state­ment of in­tent al­so in­di­cat­ed that it plans, by 2030, to re­duce its out­put of oil and gas by a whop­ping 40 per cent and that it will re­duce its Cap­i­tal Ex­pen­di­ture to be­tween US $9 and $11 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly.

The ma­jor an­nounce­ment was made on Tues­day as the com­pa­ny al­so re­vealed a loss of US $16.8 bil­lion for the sec­ond quar­ter of 2020 and slashed its div­i­dend pay­ment by 50 per cent for the first since the Deep Hori­zon dis­as­ter in the Gulf of Mex­i­co.

The com­pa­ny had record­ed a US $1.8 bil­lion prof­it for the same pe­ri­od last year.

Khan said he be­lieves that T&T will re­main “large­ly un­touched” in the short-term.

“We have al­ways had to com­pete for cap­i­tal among the BPs and the Shell. The rea­son why we at­tract­ed cap­i­tal is be­cause we had good in­vest­ments and we are for­tu­nate to­day that we have such an ad­vanced in­fra­struc­ture of oil and gas net­works and pipelines and plat­forms that to de­vel­op small­er fields on the pe­riph­ery of the ex­ist­ing pro­duc­tion is not as ex­pen­sive as if you are go­ing in­to green­field ar­eas,” he said.

“So I think based on the sce­nar­ios in which we are op­er­at­ing we will con­tin­ue to win cap­i­tal in­jec­tion in­to BP and Shell in par­tic­u­lar as­set base in Trinidad and To­ba­go there is a risk there that we will have to con­tin­ue to man­age,” he said.

Khan said he be­lieves in the next two to five years T&T will be sit­ting rel­a­tive­ly com­fort­able.