There is good news for Trinidad and To­ba­go, as the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas re­serves slight­ly im­proved in 2018 al­though al­most 1.3 tril­lion cu­bic feet of gas (tcf) was pro­duced last year.

This is one of the ma­jor find­ings of the Ry­der Scott gas au­dit which were re­leased yes­ter­day.

The re­port showed that in 2018, nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion in­creased from 1.14 tcf of gas to 1.261 tcf of gas. As a re­sult, based on cur­rent pro­duc­tion and should no ad­di­tion­al gas be found, the coun­try has 10 years of gas based on its proven nat­ur­al gas re­serves.

“We have rough­ly 10 to 11 years. That is why the ex­plo­ration ef­fort and the de­vel­op­ment and the seis­mic ac­qui­si­tion, and the ge­o­log­i­cal stud­ies must run con­cur­rent­ly with the pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tions. That is what suc­cess­ful en­er­gy com­pa­nies do. We have some of the best ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tors in­ter­na­tion­al­ly here in T&T,” En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan said at the launch of the gas au­dit re­port pre­sent­ed by Ry­der Scott at the Min­istry of En­er­gy, Tow­er C, In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front, Port-of-Spain.

Ry­der Scott has been pre­sent­ing in­de­pen­dent re­ports for the coun­try since 2000.

Khan al­so said the cur­tail­ment of gas pro­duc­tion is be­ing re­duced.

“The fig­ure that we are striv­ing at is 4 bil­lion cu­bic feet (BCF) of gas per day. We are cur­rent­ly at 3.7 or 3.8 BCF. One of the things that you have to re­alise in pro­duc­tion is that the de­cline rates are very high. It is an in­tri­cate bal­ance of re­sources and re­serves," Khan said.

"How­ev­er, we are in a po­si­tion where the cur­tail­ment is be­ing re­duced and hope­ful­ly when the oth­er projects come on stream in 2021 and 2022 gas cur­tail­ment will be a thing of the past.”

He added that the fis­cal pack­ages for the up­stream op­er­a­tors are quite at­trac­tive and so there is no need to pro­vide ad­di­tion­al in­cen­tives at this time.

Khan said al­though T&T’s oil pro­duc­tion is small com­pared to large in­ter­na­tion­al pro­duc­ers, he hopes there could be big oil finds in the fu­ture.

“For T&T, oil is still a bet­ter busi­ness than gas be­cause oil has cer­tain ad­van­tages. It is just that the basin was giv­ing us more gas than oil. But all the gas fields we found in the east, we were look­ing for oil. I would love to find a big oil field in the Gulf of Paria or on­shore Trinidad. We have a plan to put that in­to place in the not too dis­tant fu­ture.”

He al­so said the Ry­der Scott Re­port is prob­a­bly the most im­por­tant re­port that is pre­sent­ed in the coun­try an­nu­al­ly be­cause of its im­por­tance for the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic fu­ture.

“There is no oth­er re­port pro­duced for this coun­try that is more im­por­tant than this. In a very re­al sense, this coun­try’s fu­ture is large­ly de­pen­dent on what the Ry­der Scott Re­port says.”

Based on the find­ings of the re­port, he said T&T’s long term fu­ture in the gas sec­tor is well se­cured.

Ry­der Scott Ex­ec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent Her­man Acu­na, who pre­sent­ed the re­port, said that gas pro­duc­tion had been ris­ing last few years.

“Last few years pro­duc­tion has been in­creas­ing, which is the high­est it has been for the last three years. The li­on's share that has con­tributed to this pro­duc­tion is from BPTT with 61 per cent of that pro­duc­tion. In gen­er­al, the pro­duc­tion share has been very steady be­tween the dif­fer­ent op­er­a­tors.”

He added that there must be a sus­tain­able lev­el of proved re­serves to sus­tain the busi­ness in the gas sec­tor.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, in 2018 the proved re­serves were 10,526 BCF while in 2017 they were 10,515 BCF.

“The proved re­serves im­proved by 6 per cent in 2018. Pro­duc­tion in 2019 was 1.26 TCF of gas,” Acu­na said.