The Joe Dou­glas Jack Up rig has re­turned to Trinidad wa­ters to be­gin a new round of drilling next month, bp Trinidad and To­ba­go (bpTT) has an­nounced. 

The drilling rig ar­rived in Trinidad on 30 Au­gust 2022 at Ch­aguara­mas and will be pro­ceed­ing to bpTT's Man­go drilling site – sit­u­at­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 48km off the Ga­le­o­ta Point on Trinidad’s south­east coast. 

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease is­sued to­day this drilling pro­gramme, in­clu­sive of both de­vel­op­ment and ex­plo­ration drilling is key for bpTT to con­tin­ue to find and de­vel­op small pools of re­sources with­in the Colum­bus Basin.  

The first phase of the drilling pro­gramme will in­volve de­vel­op­ment drilling of three wells in the Man­go field and one well in the Savonette field.  

"If this drilling phase is suc­cess­ful, these gas re­sources will be processed through the ex­ist­ing Man­go and Savonette pro­duc­tion plat­forms and could add pro­duc­tion in late 2022/ear­ly 2023," bpTT stat­ed. 

The sec­ond phase of the drilling pro­gram in­cludes the po­ten­tial for three ad­di­tion­al wells in the An­gelin field and this phase is cur­rent­ly pro­gress­ing through the sanc­tion process.  

“We are ex­cit­ed to wel­come back the Joe Dou­glas drilling rig to bpTT. This rig sig­nals the re­sump­tion of our small pools (in­fill) drilling pro­gramme. This drilling pro­gramme is aimed at get­ting af­ter small­er pools of re­sources in the Colum­bus Basin. These small­er pools are close to our ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture which means we can bring gas on­line quick­ly - this will help de­liv­er the se­cure, af­ford­able and low­er car­bon en­er­gy that the world needs,” Claire Fitz­patrick, bpTT's re­gion­al pres­i­dent stat­ed. 

In 2016 the rig had joined the bpTT rig fleet at the Amher­s­tia fa­cil­i­ty.

Re­porter: Joel Julien