Wood­side En­er­gy has re­sumed op­er­a­tions fol­low­ing an in­ci­dent in the An­gos­tu­ra field off­shore Trinidad, which led to its nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty be­ing shut down as a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure fol­low­ing a process safe­ty in­ci­dent.

The shut­down of the pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty re­sult­ed in at least four petro­chem­i­cal plants on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate hav­ing to pause their pro­duc­tion.

In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day, Wood­side En­er­gy said on Au­gust 4, 2023, it com­menced a phased restart of pro­duc­tion at its An­gos­tu­ra fa­cil­i­ty.

“The fa­cil­i­ty had been shut in the pre­vi­ous week as a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure fol­low­ing a process safe­ty in­ci­dent. The phased restart com­menced fol­low­ing com­ple­tion of rel­e­vant safe­ty checks, which will con­tin­ue as pro­duc­tion ramps up. As al­ways, the safe­ty of our per­son­nel and our op­er­a­tions is Wood­side’s pri­or­i­ty,” the com­pa­ny added.

Wood­side En­er­gy said the process safe­ty in­ci­dent at its off­shore fa­cil­i­ty oc­curred on Ju­ly 25.

“All per­son­nel are safe and ac­count­ed for. We are work­ing to safe­ly re­sume op­er­a­tions,” the com­pa­ny not­ed.

En­er­gy Min­istry Stu­art Young re­vealed on Ju­ly 28, that one of T&T’s ma­jor up­stream gas sup­pli­ers had to shut in its gas pro­duc­tion to deal with an “un­planned tech­ni­cal is­sue.”

“This un­for­tu­nate and un­time­ly is­sue has led to a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in cur­rent gas sup­ply which in turn has af­fect­ed the end users of gas.

“This un­fore­seen event is be­ing giv­en the pri­or­i­ty ur­gent at­ten­tion that is nec­es­sary by the up­stream en­ti­ty. It is hoped that the sit­u­a­tion will be re­solved in the short­est pos­si­ble time frame,” the En­er­gy Min­istry had said.

The Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) al­so said that while some plants were un­der­go­ing rou­tine main­te­nance, oth­ers have had to sus­pend op­er­a­tions due to Wood­side’s shut-in and re­duced avail­able gas vol­umes.

Wood­side op­er­ates two shal­low-wa­ter con­ven­tion­al oil and gas fields — An­gos­tu­ra and Ru­by — in T&T.

Ac­cord­ing to Wood­side En­er­gy, the Greater An­gos­tu­ra field is an off­shore con­ven­tion­al oil and gas field lo­cat­ed 38 kilo­me­tres north­east of Trinidad.

The An­gos­tu­ra field was dis­cov­ered in 1999, with first oil achieved in Jan­u­ary 2005 (Phase 1). Phase 2 es­tab­lished gas sales in 2011. First gas for An­gos­tu­ra Phase 3 was es­tab­lished in Sep­tem­ber 2016.

Ru­by is a con­ven­tion­al off­shore oil and gas field lo­cat­ed with­in the Greater An­gos­tu­ra Fields. First oil was achieved in May 2021.

The cur­rent de­vel­op­ment com­pris­es a main cen­tral pro­cess­ing plat­form (CPP), gas ex­port plat­form (GEP), four well­head pro­tec­tor plat­forms (WPP) and on­shore ter­mi­nal. Flow­lines con­nect the Ru­by well­head plat­form back to the CPP and GEP for pro­cess­ing.

Crude oil from CPP is trans­port­ed to the Ter­mi­nal Fa­cil­i­ty lo­cat­ed in the south east­ern end of Trinidad.

Wood­side En­er­gy pro­duced an es­ti­mat­ed av­er­age of 343 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary to May 2023.

With T&T’s to­tal nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion for the first five months of this year to­tal­ing an av­er­age of 2.65 tril­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet, Wood­side En­er­gy’s out­put equaled 13 per cent of the to­tal, mak­ing it the coun­try’s third-largest sup­pli­er.

BpTT and Shell are T&T’s first and sec­ond-largest sup­pli­ers of nat­ur­al gas.