An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

This year is ex­pect­ed to be a bumper one for the Cana­di­an en­er­gy com­pa­ny, Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration, as the Cas­cadu­ra fa­cil­i­ty at the field in Rio Claro is up and run­ning and many drilling projects are al­so sched­uled.

This was an­nounced by Touch­stone’s pres­i­dent and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Paul Baay, as he spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian at the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence ear­li­er this week at the Hy­att Re­gency.

Baay said two wells are on at the Cas­cadu­ra field and the plan is to op­ti­mise the nat­ur­al gas field’s pro­duc­tion.

Touch­stone start­ed pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al gas and as­so­ci­at­ed liq­uids from the field in Sep­tem­ber last year.

From those par­tic­u­lar two wells,, he ex­plained that about 35 mil­lion cu­bic feet a day is ex­pect­ed.

“We’re do­ing ad­di­tion­al work on the one well this week, and Touch­stone hopes that it will go up to 55-60 mil­lion cu­bic feet a day when work is done on that well. That’s the short-term plan,” Baay dis­closed.

He in­di­cat­ed that drilling be­gan ear­li­er this month for the de­vel­op­ment of wells from Cas­cadu­ra. The com­pa­ny’s plan for this year is to drill as many wells as pos­si­ble to get the fa­cil­i­ty up to full ca­pac­i­ty, which is about 90 mil­lion cu­bic feet a day.

In a news re­lease last Sep­tem­ber to an­nounce the start of pro­duc­tion from Cas­cadu­ra, Touch­stone said: “Nat­ur­al gas and as­so­ci­at­ed liq­uids pro­duc­tion from the com­pa­ny’s Cas­cadu­ra wells is sep­a­rat­ed at the Cas­cadu­ra fa­cil­i­ty on the Cas­cadu­ra A sur­face lo­ca­tion. The fa­cil­i­ty op­er­ates as a self-con­tained sys­tem, cap­tur­ing all nat­ur­al gas from the sep­a­ra­tors and liq­uids stor­age tanks and re­cy­cling it back in­to the sys­tem to in­crease sales vol­umes.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the fa­cil­i­ty sus­tains its own pow­er re­quire­ments through on­site so­lar sys­tems and nat­ur­al gas gen­er­a­tors and is en­tire­ly in­de­pen­dent of the Trinidad pow­er grid. The fa­cil­i­ty has a de­signed gross pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 200 mil­lion cu­bic feet per day and 5,000 bbls/d of as­so­ci­at­ed liq­uids, with a cur­rent gross pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 90 mil­lion cu­bic feet per day and 2,250 bbls/d of as­so­ci­at­ed liq­uids (17,250 boe/d).”

Baay said the en­er­gy com­pa­ny is look­ing to dri­ve pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al gas 200 mil­lion cu­bic feet a day by 2025.

“And then the rest of the plan for this year is at our Co­ho fa­cil­i­ty that came on in 2022. The oil and gas com­pa­ny has two wells planned for there. And the idea is to take that plant up to a ca­pac­i­ty of 24 mil­lion cu­bic feet a day. So those won’t come on un­til ear­ly 2025, but the wells will be drilled in 2024,” Baay ex­plained.

Fur­ther, he said all the per­mits are in place along with equip­ment.

“So, it’s just a mat­ter of drilling the wells to fill the plant,” Baay said.

Asked how much Touch­stone is ex­pect­ed to spend this year on the Cas­cadu­ra projects in 2024, the en­er­gy ex­ec­u­tive said the cap­i­tal bud­get is set at US$32 mil­lion with rev­enue ex­pect­ed to be about US$32 mil­lion.

“Ba­si­cal­ly, we’re spend­ing all of our mon­ey down here this year, in Trinidad and it’s all go­ing in­to the drilling and a small por­tion, about US$5 mil­lion of that US$32 mil­lion, will go to tie the wells back in­to the Cas­cadu­ra fa­cil­i­ty. So, you can kind of see the bulk of that is all on the drilling side,” Baay re­vealed.

As it re­lates to the ease of do­ing busi­ness, he said there has been an im­prove­ment and it may be on both sides as Touch­stone un­der­stands the sys­tem bet­ter .Build­ing the sec­ond plant was al­so eas­i­er than build­ing the first plant.

“I think that was part­ly be­cause there hadn’t been a plant built in 20 years. So, there was learn­ing on both sides of it. But I think for the Cas­cadu­ra project and Co­ho for that mat­ter, we have all the ap­provals in place.

“There was a lit­tle bit of pain at the be­gin­ning to get full ap­proval from the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) and every­body. But the way the ap­provals work is they’re de­signed as project ap­provals. Once you’ve got one in place, then you can go ahead and lay it out. The com­pa­ny is kind of in that phase now where it’s re­al­ly on us now to per­form and the Gov­ern­ment’s kind of do­ing what they need to do,” he de­tailed.

Re­la­tion­ship with NGC

Last Sep­tem­ber, the whol­ly state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) an­nounced that it will pur­chase nat­ur­al gas from the Cas­cadu­ra field, fol­low­ing a gas sales con­tract pre­vi­ous­ly signed with the com­pa­ny.

NGC, in a state­ment, said this mile­stone was dou­bly im­por­tant for NGC as the com­pa­ny was re­spon­si­ble for the con­struc­tion of as­so­ci­at­ed in­fra­struc­ture that fa­cil­i­tat­ed the tie-in of the Cas­cadu­ra fa­cil­i­ty to the do­mes­tic net­work.

Baay praised NGC for be­ing a good part­ner and said the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the com­pa­nies is strong.

“I mean, NGC, beat us to get­ting the pipeline in the ground for the in­fra­strc­ture, so they were wait­ing on us. We weren’t wait­ing on them, which tells you some­thing. And then al­so, un­der the con­tract terms, they were great. Like on-time pay­ments, we’re get­ting paid in the US which is how we fund a lot of our cap­i­tal. So, it’s been re­al­ly good, and we do have some plans to ex­pand that part­ner­ship as we move for­ward. So yeah, I think that’s a strong re­la­tion­ship,” Baay out­lined.

Ques­tioned on plans to in­crease wells and oth­er projects in Trinidad, he quick­ly said “yes” as Touch­stone is 100 per cent en­trenched in Trinidad and does not have any as­sets any­where else.

“Un­like bpTT or Shell or Wood­side, who com­pete around the world for cap­i­tal, all of our cap­i­tal is here. And the com­pa­ny’s board made it very clear that we want to get to be big­ger here. We think we have a com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage. We’re small, we’re on­shore, we’ve got these gas plants. So that’s a sim­ple plan right now.”

Baay is con­fi­dent that Touch­stone’s fi­nan­cials will see a turn­around as a re­sult of the drilling ac­tiv­i­ties.

“What we saw is for a pe­ri­od when we were build­ing these gas plants, there wasn’t a lot go­ing on. We weren’t drilling any wells. Touch­stone was spend­ing a tonne of mon­ey. So you know, that nev­er works well on the fi­nan­cial side and what you’ll see is, es­pe­cial­ly in the last quar­ter of last year, with Cas­cadu­ra be­ing on stream, and that’ll get an­nounced in March.

“We built the mar­ket change, which we call a year of tran­si­tion for us. We went from be­ing an ex­plo­ration com­pa­ny to be­ing a pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny. Cas­cadu­ra came on, and those num­bers are start­ing to show up through 2024. Fi­nan­cials this year would be very dif­fer­ent to last year,” he stressed.

Crime

On the is­sue of crime that con­tin­ues to af­fect this coun­try, Baay said for­tu­nate­ly the com­pa­ny hasn’t had any di­rect in­ci­dents as yet.

“We tend to car­pool and have sev­er­al peo­ple in ve­hi­cles just to low­er our car­bon foot­print as well. And then I think the oth­er side to safe­ty is we do have se­cu­ri­ty on each one of the sites. And so, I think that’s a com­bi­na­tion of what we do. We al­so do a lot of dri­ver ed­u­ca­tion and that al­so helps to make peo­ple aware,” he added.