Paul Baay, pres­i­dent and CEO of Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration and the com­pa­ny’s ex­plo­ration man­ag­er Xavier Moo­nan yes­ter­day pro­vid­ed the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries de­tails of its drilling and plans for in­creased pro­duc­tion in 2022 and 2023 giv­en the Gov­ern­ment’s re­cent ap­proval of a five-year ex­ten­sion of the ex­plo­ration pe­ri­od of the Or­toire Li­cence to Ju­ly 31, 2026. Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the Min­istry of En­er­gy, both men dis­cussed the on­go­ing de­vel­op­ments of Cas­cadu­ra and Roys­ton fol­low­ing the for­mal ap­proval of Or­toire li­cence ex­ten­sion which, they stat­ed, pro­vid­ed them with “a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­sign and im­ple­ment an ex­pand­ed ex­plo­ration pro­gramme to ful­ly eval­u­ate our in­ter­nal­ly iden­ti­fied prospects on the acreage.”

The duo met with the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Stu­art Young and Act­ing Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Pene­lope Brad­shaw-Niles.

The Min­is­ter was said to be pleased with the plans from Touch­stone and urged the com­pa­ny to con­tin­ue with its plans and “to con­sid­er op­por­tu­ni­ties pre­sent­ed in the up­com­ing On­shore Bid Round giv­en
the high oil and gas prices.”

The Min­is­ter al­so ex­pressed his op­ti­mism at the pro­duc­tion to be re­alised from the dis­cov­er­ies in the Or­toire Block.

Baay re­cent­ly re­vealed that the first gas from its Co­ho dis­cov­ery to flow in ear­ly May with pro­duc­tion from its Or­toire dis­cov­er­ies by the end of the year.

Ac­cord­ing to Baay this will lead to an ad­di­tion of 100 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas to the na­tion­al pro­duc­tion, all of which will go in­to petro­chem­i­cals and elec­tric­i­ty.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian Baay said, “The first gas that we are look­ing at Or­toire would be ear­ly May and then the sec­ond phase that we are look­ing at, which is the sec­ond fa­cil­i­ty com­ing on stream would come on in, we are hop­ing for the start of Au­gust time frame.

The first phase is about 10 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (mm­scf/d) and the sec­ond phase 60 mm­scf/d, get­ting ramped up to 90 mm­scf/d dur­ing 4th quar­ter, so by the end of the year about 100 mm­scf/d will be com­ing out of Or­toire.”

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