Cur­tis Williams

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

Aus­tralian out­fit BHP has con­firmed that it’s re­cent search for oil in Trinidad and To­ba­go’ deep wa­ter end­ed in fail­ure with the Broad­side-1 well be­ing a dry hole.

In its quar­ter­ly op­er­a­tional re­view, the com­pa­ny said it has aban­doned the well af­ter the fail­ure to en­counter hy­dro­car­bons.

It said: “In Trinidad and To­ba­go, the Broad­side-1 ex­plo­ration well in the South­ern Li­cence reached the main reser­voir on 22 Oc­to­ber 2020 and did not en­counter hy­dro­car­bons. The well was a dry hole and was plugged and aban­doned on 8 No­vem­ber 2020. The re­sults are un­der eval­u­a­tion to de­ter­mine next steps on the South­ern Li­cences.”

On Oc­to­ber 29 last year, the Busi­ness Guardian re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly that BHP’s deep-wa­ter well Broad­side-1 had failed to find oil or gas and was a dry hole. The well, which car­ried with it the hopes of T&T and the ex­pec­ta­tion of a mas­sive deep wa­ter oil dis­cov­ery, proved un­suc­cess­ful.

At the time, nei­ther the com­pa­ny nor the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go were pre­pared to con­firm the de­vel­op­ment. How­ev­er, in light of BHP’s lat­est an­nounce­ment, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan ad­mit­ted the fail­ure.

“The Broad­side-1 well was drilled in the acreage off the South East Coast and that was drilled as an oil prospect and ob­vi­ous­ly it is now of­fi­cial that was ba­si­cal­ly a dry hole. They found reser­voirs but they did not find the charge, what they call the ther­mo­genic charge that would pro­duce the liq­uid hy­dro­car­bons...that in no way di­min­ish­es the po­ten­tial of the North East acreage,” Khan said yes­ter­day.

On Sep­tem­ber 15, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley host­ed an event at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, at which he praised the com­pa­ny for its con­tin­ued in­ter­est in T&T and not­ed that BHP had be­gun drilling its Broad­side-1 well, which was ex­pect­ed to test the oil play with­in BHP’s South­ern Deep-wa­ter Blocks, which in­clude TTDAA 3, 5 and 6.

“If the finds of the Broad­side well are promis­ing, it can in­form the drilling of fur­ther ex­plo­ration wells in near­by blocks. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, a com­mer­cial dis­cov­ery in any of Broad­side’s Miocene tar­gets could de-risk the ma­jor­i­ty of the prospec­tive re­sources iden­ti­fied by Nether­land, Sewell and As­so­ciates, Inc (NSAI) in its au­dit of the coun­try’s crude oil re­serves and re­sources for year-end 2018,” Row­ley not­ed then.

But this was not to be and short­ly af­ter the event, the drilling of the well en­coun­tered prob­lems with stuck pipes and while the com­pa­ny was able to even­tu­al­ly con­tin­ue drilling, it nev­er found any oil nor gas.