BHP Bil­li­ton and its part­ners are ex­pect­ed to start drilling an ex­plo­ration well in its block 2c as it tries to find ad­di­tion­al hy­dro­car­bon re­serves. The com­pa­ny is drilling its well, Can­teen North 1, which is, as the name sug­gests, is sit­u­at­ed north of its Can­teen oil dis­cov­ery, which forms part of its greater An­gos­tu­ra dis­cov­ery. The well comes mere months af­ter the com­pa­ny start­ed pro­duc­ing nat­ur­al gas from its fa­cil­i­ties and as it tries des­per­ate­ly to keep its oil busi­ness go­ing amidst low pro­duc­tion. BHP Bil­li­ton and its part­ners op­er­ate the An­gos­tu­ra field in Block 2(c) 24 miles east of Trinidad close to To­co. Oil and gas re­sources were dis­cov­ered with­in a large fault­ed struc­ture known as the Greater An­gos­tu­ra struc­ture.

An­gos­tu­ra-1, drilled in 1999, was the dis­cov­ery well for the field, in­ter­sect­ing some 950 feet (gross) of gas pay with­in Ear­ly Oligocene sands. Gross re­cov­er­able oil re­serves are es­ti­mat­ed at 90-300 mil­lion bar­rels in place, with re­cov­er­able re­serves of up to 160 mil­lion bar­rels. The range of gross re­cov­er­able gas vol­umes is 1 and 2.3 tril­lion cu­bic feet, with a mid­case re­cov­er­able vol­ume of 1.75 tril­lion cu­bic feet with the mid-case re­source es­ti­mat­ed at 450 mil­lion bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent. Since BHP and its part­ners start­ed pro­duc­tion from An­gos­tu­ra, its crude pro­duc­tion has fall­en from 60,000 bar­rels of oil/day to around 13,000 bar­rels. BHP has been plagued by the ex­tent of fault­ing in the An­gos­tu­ra dis­cov­ery, which has made it dif­fi­cult to pro­duce be­cause the oil is cap­tured in small faults and an ex­ten­sive amount of wells will have to be drilled to max­imise its pro­duc­tion.

The con­sor­tium has des­ig­nat­ed the well a tight hole, which means that nei­ther the Min­istry of En­er­gy nor mem­bers of its con­sor­tium can com­ment on the well un­less they re­ceive per­mis­sion from the op­er­a­tor BHP. But well-placed sources at the com­pa­ny tell the Busi­ness Guardian that the well is ex­pect­ed to en­counter oil rather than gas. BG has learnt that the in­tend­ed struc­ture is rel­a­tive­ly small and a best case sce­nario sug­gest that a dis­cov­ery will on­ly add a few mil­lion bar­rels of re­serves, but could add an ad­di­tion­al4,000 bo/d to BHP and the coun­try's crude pro­duc­tion. With crude prices well over US$90 a bar­rel, the part­ners feel they can make mon­ey from any dis­cov­ery. In ad­di­tion, if a dis­cov­ery is made, there will not be need for the com­pa­ny to spend mon­ey to put in ad­di­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties as the plan is to pro­duce any dis­cov­ery from its can­teen plat­form by drilling de­vi­at­ed wells.

The present well is be­ing drilled to a depth of just over 5,000 feet and is al­so slight­ly de­vi­at­ed. The part­ners say the de­ci­sion to drill an ex­plo­ration well had to do with the strong oil prices. It al­so had to do with the com­pa­ny fi­nal­ly get­ting its hands on im­proved seis­mic da­ta, which it was able to re­process, and could now see clear­ly what it feels is an oil struc­ture. BG was told that the con­sor­tium is con­vinced that there is oil in the for­ma­tion and not gas, be­cause it found that as it moved from west to east in the block, the dis­cov­er­ies moved from nat­ur­al gas to oil and con­den­sate. T&T's crude pro­duc­tion is the low­est it has been in the last 50 years, and for the first time last year, av­er­age less than 100,000 bar­rels a day.

Even with high crude prices, the coun­try has not sig­nif­i­cant­ly ben­e­fit­ted due to low crude pro­duc­tion.