GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

T&T has re­ceived six bids on four blocks from BP, Shell and EOG Re­sources in the 2023 shal­low wa­ter auc­tion to ex­plore for oil and gas.

This means, that nine of the 13 blocks did not re­ceive any in­ter­est as the bids came to a close.

The re­sults were an­nounced by Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day which saw BP, Shell and EOG Re­sources Trinidad Ltd, be­ing the on­ly com­pa­nies to bid on blocks.

These en­ti­ties are al­ready op­er­at­ing in T&T.

EOG Re­sources was the most ac­tive with bids on three blocks.

The mod­i­fied U block was the one sought af­ter most with BP, Shell and EOG Re­sources of­fer­ing bids.

In his ad­dress at the news con­fer­ence, Young said a de­ci­sion would be made with­in the next four months to an­nounce the win­ners.

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter said that T&T is a ma­ture province and hav­ing re­gard to the glob­al shift away from hy­dro­car­bon ex­plo­ration, it would be dif­fi­cult to at­tract new en­ti­ties. Young al­so said many en­er­gy com­pa­nies have tak­en de­ci­sions not to in­vest in new ter­ri­to­ries.

"In the spir­it of boost­ing in­ter­est in the bid-round, the min­istry em­barked on a re­view of the bid­ding process and sev­er­al changes were made to in­cen­tivise the process.

"The mod­el pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tract was al­so re­viewed and changes were made to re­flect cur­rent en­er­gy in­dus­try cli­mate; in­clu­sive of the in­tro­duc­tion of an

in­fra­struc­ture-shar­ing pol­i­cy," he ex­plained.

Young added the min­istry was com­mit­ted to a trans­par­ent and fair bid­ding process.

Bid­ders will be eval­u­at­ed on the ba­sis of a point sys­tem. The eval­u­a­tion will be con­duct­ed by a tech­ni­cal eval­u­a­tion team com­pris­ing se­nior of­fi­cials of the Min­istry of En­er­gy, Min­istry of Fi­nance and the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al.

Pro­duc­tion Shar­ing Con­tracts (PSCs) shall be is­sued to the suc­cess­ful bid­ders ini­tial­ly for a pe­ri­od of eight years.

Up­on the achieve­ment of a com­mer­cial dis­cov­ery, PSCs may be re­newed for a term of 25 years from the ef­fec­tive date of the con­tract.

Fol­low­ing the the 2021 deep­wa­ter com­pet­i­tive bid­ding round and the 2022 on­shore/nearshore com­pet­i­tive bid­ding round, this shal­low wa­ter bid­ding round was the third in a se­ries of bid rounds con­duct­ed by the Min­istry of En­er­gy.

Speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia yes­ter­day, bpTT pres­i­dent David Camp­bell said T&T ought to have con­fi­dence in its up­stream sec­tor.

"There is a fu­ture here and the min­is­ter al­so men­tioned a fur­ther deep­wa­ter bid round to come and of course we have the ex­ist­ing deep­wa­ter round that fin­ish last year that we teamed up with our part­ner Shell. I think there is a lot of in­ter­est, and we should take some con­fi­dence from that," he said.