GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

T&T had 11.49 tril­lion cu­bic feet (tcf) of nat­ur­al gas un­der con­tract to be de­vel­oped at the end of 2022, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young told a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

Ad­dress­ing the pub­lic dis­clo­sure of the nat­ur­al gas au­dits for the years 2021 and 2022, Young said with gas us­age at just un­der 1 tril­lion cu­bic feet.

“So by pro­jec­tion, if you have 11 and a half tcf, and if we are to con­tin­ue gas pro­duc­tion at cur­rent rates, we have 11 more years of nat­ur­al gas in our fields.”

He said T&T has an ad­di­tion­al 9 tcf of nat­ur­al gas that is known to ex­ist but re­quires ex­plo­ration and ap­praisal wells to be brought to pro­duc­tion.

“When you look at those fig­ures, you are look­ing at a po­ten­tial of an­oth­er ten to po­ten­tial­ly 20 years,” Young said, in the ques­tion and an­swer pe­ri­od.

The nat­ur­al gas au­dits for 2021 and 2022 were con­duct­ed by in­de­pen­dent pe­tro­le­um con­sul­tants, De­Goly­er and Mac­Naughton (D&M) of Dal­las, Texas, USA on be­half of the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries.

In his ad­dress, the min­is­ter said, “The out­look for nat­ur­al gas con­tin­ues to be promis­ing for Trinidad and To­ba­go, as we con­tin­ue to en­cour­age ex­plo­ration as well as ap­praisal and de­vel­op­men­tal drilling, so that re­sources can be moved from the cat­e­gories of high­er risk to the low­est risked P1 + C1 tech­ni­cal­ly re­cov­er­able re­source cat­e­go­ry.”

Young based his prog­no­sis of a promis­ing out­look on the fact that op­er­a­tors con­tin­ue to in­vest in nat­ur­al gas as ev­i­denced by bpTT’s Cypre de­vel­op­ment which start­ed drilling the first of sev­en wells in Feb­ru­ary and is planned to tar­get a re­source es­ti­mate of 479 BCF and de­liv­er first gas by 2025.

“De­vel­op­ment drilling is al­so on­go­ing by Touch­stone in the on­shore Cas­cadu­ra gas field, as well as ex­plo­ration and de­vel­op­ment drilling by EOG in Paru­la,” Young out­lined.

He said on Oc­to­ber 3, 2023, the Shal­low Wa­ter Com­pet­i­tive Bid Round was opened and it is due to close lat­er on May 27. He ex­pressed op­ti­mism at the de­vel­op­ments, giv­en the in­ter­est by some of the com­pa­nies to changes made in the terms and con­di­tions of this Shal­low Wa­ter Bid Round.

Young added ex­plo­ration re­sources were sta­t­ic from 2020 to 2021 but then rose by al­most three per cent be­tween 2021 and 2022.

These au­dits, Young de­scribed gave a snap­shot of na­tion­al re­serves and re­sources, adding that the re­sults are used by the Min­istry of En­er­gy to en­sure the Gov­ern­ment is strate­gi­cal­ly po­si­tioned to guide busi­ness and op­er­a­tion de­ci­sions.

Mean­while, Bryan Ram­sumair, pres­i­dent of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er De­N­o­vo told Guardian Me­dia the pre­sen­ta­tion was en­cour­ag­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the Young’s plans for up­stream ex­plo­ration.

“What is en­cour­ag­ing is not on­ly the fact that we see a re­serve re­place­ment ra­tio above one, but the min­is­ter is in­di­cat­ing a will­ing­ness to talk to up­stream was about fur­ther acreage where it’s near near near near to in­fra­struc­ture to be able to put new terms and con­di­tions in place to get ad­di­tion­al acreage,” Ram­sumair said.

Young not­ed the da­ta for the 2023 au­dit has been gath­ered and in­de­pen­dent eval­u­a­tions are un­der­way on map­ping Shell’s Aphrodite dis­cov­ery, the per­for­mance of EOG’s Os­prey East wells and BP’s in­fill drilling in Man­go, An­gelin and Savonette, to name but a few ex­am­ples.

He, how­ev­er, cau­tioned that T&T is a ma­ture province and as Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to ex­ploit its re­sources it does face de­clines with the con­tin­ued ex­plo­ration and ap­praisal wells.

“I hope we will be able to move some of our re­sources and our re­serves in­to in­to the the proven and prob­a­ble cat­e­gories. There is al­so some work that was done re­cent­ly in the Colum­bus Basin and I look for­ward to some suc­cess in that area. With some new drilling tech­niques. That will be used in the fu­ture,” Young added.