Yvonne Webb

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is very op­ti­mistic about find­ing oil and gas in wells be­ing drilled in the north­ern deep wa­ter blocks op­er­at­ed by BHP Bil­li­ton.If the ex­er­cise is a suc­cess, he said, it would be a wa­ter­shed de­vel­op­ment and he called on the coun­try to pray that it is not a dry hole.

Row­ley vis­it­ed the Transocean's Deep­wa­ter In­vic­tus drill ship on Tues­day, ac­com­pa­nied by Vin­cent Pereira, BHP Bil­li­ton Coun­try Man­ag­er for T&T, Derek Card­no, Vice Pres­i­dent of Drilling and Com­ple­tions, and a con­tin­gent of BHP Bil­li­ton of­fi­cials. He was giv­en to an ex­ten­sive guid­ed tour of the state-of-the-art ship which is cur­rent­ly en­gaged in an off­shore drilling cam­paign on be­half of BHP Bil­li­ton.

Com­ment­ing on his vis­it to the deep­wa­ter blocks "where BHP, Shell and BP are break­ing new grounds," Row­ley said he knows peo­ple feel the coun­try should not set it sights on the hy­dro­car­bon sec­tor be­cause of the low oil and gas prices on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket.

How­ev­er, speak­ing at a Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) po­lit­i­cal meet­ing in San Fer­nan­do on Tues­day night, he de­clared: "The lifeblood of this coun­try is the hy­dro car­bon sec­tor and we al­ways main­tain what we need to do is to do the most and the best in that area and do oth­er things in oth­er ar­eas."

The prime min­is­ter said he spent Tues­day on the drill ship, which can op­er­ate in as much as 12,000 feet of wa­ter and drill as deep as deep as 40,000 feet be­low the sur­face.

"The drill ship that is do­ing that pro­gramme for the drilling of three wells is one of the mar­vels of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy," he said. adding that it costs US$1.2 mil­lion a day to op­er­ate.

"So you can un­der­stand why those with deep pock­ets are the ones who can go in­to deep­wa­ter be­cause af­ter that well, which should take al­most 80 days to drill at US$1.2 mil­lion per day, God for­bid that hole is dry.

"So we, as a pray­ing peo­ple, will have to keep our fin­gers crossed that as we face this new province we will be suc­cess­ful in find­ing oil and gas in the three wells."

Row­ley said be­cause the ar­eas are so new and the chal­lenge is so great, "it would be a wa­ter­shed de­vel­op­ment if we are suc­cess­ful out there."

In its op­er­a­tions around the world, BHP Bil­li­ton is cur­rent­ly con­cen­trat­ing their ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ties on a small num­ber of basins thay they con­sid­er to be top tier prospects with po­ten­tial for up­wards of 5 bil­lion bar­rels of oil in place. Ear­li­er this year, the com­pa­ny com­plet­ed a mas­sive seis­mic ac­qui­si­tion cam­paign in their T&T deep-wa­ter acreage which has in­creased their con­fi­dence in the ge­ol­o­gy and the po­ten­tial of the basin.