There has been a mas­sive in­crease in the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion be­tween last year No­vem­ber and Jan­u­ary 2022. Oil pro­duc­tion is al­so on the rise with an in­crease of about 1,500 bar­rels of oil per day over the three-month pe­ri­od.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy has not re­leased any pro­duc­tion fig­ures since last No­vem­ber, al­most four months ago, but the Busi­ness Guardian has got­ten ac­cess to the fig­ures and can to­day re­port that nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion moved from an av­er­age of 2.344 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bscf/d) to 2.893 bscf/d in Jan­u­ary 2022.

The in­crease of more than 500 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scf/d) of gas rep­re­sents a growth of over 23 per­cent in the two-month pe­ri­od and could not come at a bet­ter for the coun­try as it oc­curred when glob­al­ly nat­ur­al gas prices have been high and near record prices for sev­er­al petro­chem­i­cal prod­ucts.

Nat­ur­al gas is the main feed­stock in the pro­duc­tion of com­modi­ties like methanol, am­mo­nia and urea.

Ac­cord­ing to fig­ures from the Min­istry of En­er­gy, the mas­sive growth in pro­duc­tion was at­trib­ut­able main­ly to the im­proved per­for­mance from Roy­al Dutch Shell.

Shell’s pro­duc­tion moved from 249 mm­scf/d to 638mm­scf/d. There was al­so im­proved per­for­mance from bpTT which saw its out­put grow­ing from 1,269 mm­scf/d in No­vem­ber 2021 to 1,390 mm­scf/d in Jan­u­ary 2022, but still way be­low its tra­di­tion­al pro­duc­tion of 2000 mm­scf/d.

Pro­duc­tion out of BHP and EOG Re­sources re­mained sta­ble dur­ing the pe­ri­od av­er­ag­ing just over 400 mm­scf/d for BHP and 350 mm­scf/d for EOG.

BpTT and Shell have been at the heart of the nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment that the coun­try has suf­fered over the last decade which has re­sult­ed in the shut­down of At­lantic LNG’s Train 1 and a num­ber of petro­chem­i­cal plants.

On­ly re­cent­ly bpTT con­firmed that this year it will pro­duce a mere 1.25 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bscf/d), 750 (mm­scf/d) less than it had pro­duced a mere two years ago.

In a con­fi­den­tial se­ries of doc­u­ments which the Busi­ness Guardian ob­tained, bpTT told the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion that go­ing for­ward it should ex­pect much low­er than orig­i­nal­ly fore­cast nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, with the short­fall be­ing 15 per cent in 2021 and over ten per cent un­til 2024.

The per­for­mance in 2021 was worse than was orig­i­nal­ly pre­dict­ed.

The doc­u­ments had showed that even the Mat­a­pal and Cas­sia C projects that were ex­pect­ed to in­crease pro­duc­tion by about 140 (mm­scf/d) will not now lead to that growth.

In re­sponse to ques­tions from the Busi­ness Guardian, bpTT said it end­ed 2021 av­er­ag­ing 1,250 mm­scf/d.

BpTT said: “We ex­pect pro­duc­tion for 2022 to be with­in the same range.”

The com­pa­ny blamed tech­ni­cal is­sues for the pre­cip­i­tous de­cline in pro­duc­tion in 2021 and it ad­mit­ted that even the com­ing on stream of its Cas­sia C project will on­ly hold pro­duc­tion in place.

“Dur­ing 2021 we ex­pe­ri­enced ac­cel­er­at­ed pro­duc­tion de­cline due to tech­ni­cal is­sues, which was par­tial­ly off­set when we brought Mat­a­pal on­to pro­duc­tion in Sep­tem­ber. For 2022, pro­duc­tion lev­els will be sup­port­ed by gas from Mat­a­pal, and the Cas­sia C de­vel­op­ment which is planned to come on­line in 3Q 2022.”

BpTT added that it will con­tin­ue to in­vest in ef­forts to grow pro­duc­tion. It point­ed to the sanc­tion­ing of its joint project with EOG Re­sources, it al­so points to the re­turn to in­fill drilling as ex­am­ples of its ef­forts to im­prove pro­duc­tion.

“As we con­tin­ue to in­vest in pro­duc­tion gen­er­at­ing ac­tiv­i­ties in Trinidad, we were pleased to sanc­tion the EOG Op­er­at­ed Men­to de­vel­op­ment at the end of last year, the BHP Op­er­at­ed Ca­lyp­so de­vel­op­ment com­plet­ed ap­praisal well and bpTT plans to restart our in­fill drilling pro­gramme lat­er this year. We are al­so work­ing on a num­ber of fu­ture de­vel­op­ment op­tions for bpTT, in­clud­ing our next ma­jor project the Cypre de­vel­op­ment which we are hop­ing to sanc­tion this year,” bpTT said.

As gas pro­duc­tion in­creased over the last two months so too did the util­i­sa­tion rate. Nat­ur­al Gas util­i­sa­tion went up from 2,295mm­scf/d to 2,768mm­scf/d.

Of the util­i­sa­tion rates At­lantic LNG con­sumed 1,334 mm­scf/d in Jan­u­ary 2021 up from 963mm­scf/d. The sec­ond largest sec­tor us­ing nat­ur­al gas was methanol. Its pro­duc­tion went from 443mm­scf/d to 589mm­scf/d.

Am­mo­nia us­age ac­tu­al­ly mar­gin­al­ly de­creased from 512mm­scf/d in No­vem­ber 2021 to 509mm­scf/d in Jan­u­ary 2022.

Oil pro­duc­tion av­er­aged 61,653 bar­rels per day, up from 60,605 in No­vem­ber. The in­crease was due to the im­proved per­for­mance of French out­fit Peren­co which saw its pro­duc­tion grow by 1900 bar­rels of oil per day. This was mar­gin­al­ly off­set by low­er out­put from BHP Bil­li­ton, down about 500 bo/d.

Crude oil, which has av­er­aged over US $100 since the start of Rus­sia’s in­va­sion of Ukraine, and the in­creased pro­duc­tion will be wel­comed by the Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert.