ENERGY REPORTER
It could be as late as 2014 before the country's largest natural gas supplier, bpTT, is able to make available to the downstream sector the same amount of gas it was providing before the company began significant maintenance work on its infrastructure. This was confirmed by Keith Bally, bpTT's vice-president, resource, who, in an interview with the Business Guardian said the return to previous production levels will take some time. Bally said, "The production that we had before and where we are now is as a result of doing the maintenance work, as we have said, in the past. We intend, I would say, towards the end of 2013/2014...getting back production levels that allow us a consistent supply of gas into the downstream." This will not be good news for the Minister of Finance, as only last week the Governor of the Central Bank Ewart Williams said the country's economy was in a slump and declined for three years straight. Williams blamed the inability of the Government to get its projects going, the crime situation, labour challenges and the decline of the energy sector as the main reasons for the slump. He said for the economy to meet its projection of a one per cent growth in gross domestic product, the energy sector would have to rebound and production will have to increase.
Since the beginning of infrastructure work by bpTT, the country's downstream sector has not been able to get the amount of gas it needs. This has meant lower production levels, lower revenues for the Government from the downstream companies, lower revenues from the National Gas Company, lower revenues from bpTT at the well head and lower revenues from Atlantic. Bally said the maintenance work was necessary because of ageing infrastructure and included vessel and pipeline inspections. He said bpTT was trying "to get the kit really well maintained and ready for the future." He said while the company had to do maintenance work on some of the wells, because there were some wells and facilities that had been shut in over time, but said the reduction in the condensate production had to do with the fact that over the last few years, the newer gas fields have become considerably dryer. Bally said the reduction in the liquids drop-off and the natural decline of the fields are responsible for the major fall in production. Bally said the company will embark on a programme to increase its reserves and to ensure it has produced all of the reserves it has. He said over the last four years bpTT has on average replaced 50 per cent of the gas it produced. "All of our proved reserves underpin all our contractual obligations, and then we have reserves that sit in what we call contingent which is not proved, but the risk level of those, could easily move some of those to proved if you had more contracts, for example. So we have actually been able to replace our reserves by about 50 per cent on average for the last four years." He said last year the company was able to add 50 million bo/e in reserves by things like re-mapping and reservoir performance that exceeded what was originally modelled.
Exploration in South
Bally also talked about the extensive seismic that is being undertaken over bpTT's southern trend. "We're going to spend US$275 million to acquire anywhere between 800 to 100 square kilometres of ocean-bottom cable seismic and the whole intent of is to find more resources and de-risk some of the things we already have in our portfolio that allow us to kind of prove up more gas that allows us to sustain the business well into the future." Bally told the Business Guardian the intent of the seismic is to allow BP to see into the deep horizons and to allow them to see below shallow gas, which often masks the company's ability to see into the medium to deep horizons. "So things may pop up that we haven't seen before or it may confirm things that we have interpreted before." He said the failure of the Deep Ibis well, the deepest well drilled in the history of T&T and which turned out to be a failure, taught bpTT many lessons, but its failure does not preclude the company from taking another look into the deep horizons. Bally said the intent is to go after a lot of things that exists in the company's acreage within the existing infrastructure and marginal to the infrastructure. He said the idea is to bring on those smaller potential through drilling additional wells or sidetracking.
"What we are doing is we're looking at our existing well stock. We have quite a few shut-in wells and we are going back into those and looking at bringing them back into production. "In the past, we have had wells 200 mmcf/d, 250 mmcf/d, now we are going to bring on some of these older wells. We have done a lot of repair work and they will probably produce between 15 million, 25 million cubic feet per day, but they all add up to helping our deliverability." Bally said there are a lot of smaller accumulations between 50 and 500 bcf and bpTT is looking at the use of new technology to unlock some of those smaller accumulations. "We're very much in a mature state. We are looking at sustaining our production for as long as we can into the future. We are looking at our existing base and we are looking into our existing fields and assets to ensure we don't leave anything behind." Bally said bpTT has contracts to meet and the intent is to supply those contracts at the levels it did previously. "We have started doing multi-zone completions, so we complete the well and set it up so we produce the bottom part first, so then it's mechanical for us to kind of pull the sleeve, isolate the bottom zone and actually produce the top zone."
The company is looking at technology that allows it to produce up to five zones. He noted there are some wells bpTT may be able to produce, even though they are marginal, which would be possible because of the significant infrastructure the company has off the east coast.
