The progress of Wood­side Pe­tro­le­um Ltd’s ac­qui­si­tion of the BHP Group was among the top­ics dis­cussed when En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young met with a team of BHP ex­ec­u­tives yes­ter­day.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the En­er­gy Min­istry, Young, and act­ing per­ma­nent sec­re­taries Pene­lope Brad­shaw-Niles and San­dra Fras­er met with BHP ex­ec­u­tives at the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries’ In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front Com­plex Of­fice yes­ter­day.

The BHP team in­clud­ed Gra­ham Salmond, vice pres­i­dent North Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, BHP Pe­tro­le­um; Dr So­nia Scarsel­li, vice pres­i­dent, Ex­plo­ration and Ap­praisal, BHP Pe­tro­le­um; Michael Stone, coun­try man­ag­er of BHP T&T and Dr Car­la Noel-Mendez, man­ag­er, cor­po­rate af­fairs of BHP Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“The pur­pose of this meet­ing was to pro­vide Min­is­ter Young with an up­date on BHP’s busi­ness op­er­a­tions as it re­lates to pur­su­ing in­te­grat­ed oil and gas de­vel­op­ment in T&T,” the En­er­gy Min­istry re­lease stat­ed.

Young wel­comed the BHP ex­ec­u­tives to T&T and thanked them for their con­tin­ued part­ner­ship.

“Dis­cus­sions opened with the suc­cess of the Ru­by Project and the im­ple­men­ta­tion of pro­duc­tion ahead of sched­ule de­spite nav­i­gat­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic,” the re­lease stat­ed.

“BHP pro­vid­ed up­dates on the Ru­by field and the ad­ja­cent Block 2C con­cern­ing the on­go­ing work be­ing done and pro­duc­tion. The par­ties al­so dis­cussed the progress of the BHP Wood­side ac­qui­si­tion, a mat­ter that Min­is­ter Young has been mon­i­tor­ing close­ly as he con­tin­ues to ad­vo­cate for con­tin­ued in­vest­ment and in­ter­est in our coun­try,” it stat­ed.

BHP has been op­er­at­ing in T&T for 25 years and both par­ties agreed to con­tin­ue to work to­geth­er as they look for­ward to the ad­vance­ment of these projects and sus­tain­ably grow­ing busi­ness in the coun­try.

In Au­gust Wood­side and BHP an­nounced that they had en­tered in­to a merg­er com­mit­ment deed to com­bine their re­spec­tive oil and gas port­fo­lios by an all-stock merg­er to cre­ate a glob­al top 10 in­de­pen­dent en­er­gy com­pa­ny by pro­duc­tion.

On com­ple­tion of the Trans­ac­tion, BHP’s oil and gas busi­ness would merge with Wood­side, and Wood­side would is­sue new shares to be dis­trib­uted to BHP share­hold­ers.

The ex­pand­ed Wood­side would be owned 52 per cent by ex­ist­ing Wood­side share­hold­ers and 48 per cent by ex­ist­ing BHP share­hold­ers. The Trans­ac­tion is sub­ject to con­fir­ma­to­ry due dili­gence, ne­go­ti­a­tion and ex­e­cu­tion of full form trans­ac­tion doc­u­ments, and sat­is­fac­tion of con­di­tions prece­dent in­clud­ing share­hold­er, reg­u­la­to­ry and oth­er ap­provals.

With the com­bi­na­tion of two high qual­i­ty as­set port­fo­lios, the pro­posed merg­er would cre­ate the largest en­er­gy com­pa­ny list­ed on the ASX, with a glob­al top 10 po­si­tion in the LNG in­dus­try by pro­duc­tion.

The com­bined com­pa­ny will have a high mar­gin oil port­fo­lio, long life LNG as­sets and the fi­nan­cial re­silience to help sup­ply the en­er­gy need­ed for glob­al growth and de­vel­op­ment over the en­er­gy tran­si­tion.