EN­ER­GY RE­PORTER

The Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs has ex­tend­ed the dead­line for bids on blocks in T&T's deep­wa­ter by an ad­di­tion­al month, which now moves the dead­line from Ju­ly 30 to Sep­tem­ber 4. The de­lay in the clos­ing of the bids fol­lows a five-month de­lay in the open­ing of the bid round, which was moved from No­vem­ber 2011 to April 5, 2012. It al­so fol­lows months of de­lays in the sign­ing of pro­duc­tion-shar­ing con­tracts for the 2011 bid round. Well-placed sources at the min­istry say the de­lay has been caused be­cause some of the po­ten­tial bid­ders felt the three-month time­frame was too tight. A min­istry source told the Busi­ness Guardian: "We were told by some com­pa­nies that they did not have enough time to work through their process­es, which would see a po­ten­tial bid mov­ing up the chain of com­mand and be­ing sanc­tioned. This is why we de­cid­ed to ex­tend the bid round by just over a month."

This is the first bid round that Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Kevin Ram­nar­ine will be re­spon­si­ble for, and the Min­istry of En­er­gy has made a sig­nif­i­cant ef­fort to en­sure that this bid round is more suc­cess­ful than the last deep­wa­ter bid round in which there were three bids on 12 blocks, and on­ly one block could be con­sid­ered tru­ly com­pet­i­tive with three bids on that block and sole bids on the oth­er two. To make the process more suc­cess­ful, the Min­istry of En­er­gy sig­nif­i­cant­ly al­tered the terms of the pro­duc­tion-shar­ing con­tract. On its Web site, the min­istry said of the bid round: "It will be dif­fer­ent from past rounds, tak­ing ad­van­tage of re­vised con­trac­tu­al terms, a more trans­par­ent bid-eval­u­a­tion process and fis­cal in­cen­tives de­signed to at­tract po­ten­tial in­vestors, while op­ti­mis­ing gov­ern­ment rev­enues. The acreage of­fers a mix of wa­ter depths, hy­dro­car­bon play types and pro­duc­tion po­ten­tial. "Risk as­sess­ment in all of the blocks is fa­cil­i­tat­ed by pre­vi­ous­ly ac­quired 2D and 3D seis­mic da­ta, well pen­e­tra­tions and the prox­im­i­ty of these blocks to known hy­dro­car­bon pools and pro­duc­tion."

At the launch in April, the En­er­gy Min­is­ter said his min­istry had sig­nif­i­cant­ly pro­mot­ed the 2012 bid round and he ex­pect­ed it to be suc­cess­ful. He said there had been 20 nom­i­na­tions of blocks by oil and gas com­pa­nies and the trips to the Unit­ed King­dom and the Unit­ed States gen­er­at­ed sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est in the deep­wa­ter bid round. Ram­nar­ine said the dis­cov­ery of oil in the deep­wa­ter off French Guiana and the drilling be­ing con­duct­ed by Rep­sol in Guyana had in­creased in­ter­est in the gen­er­al basin and T&T. Ram­nar­ine was crit­i­cal of the 2005/2006 deep­wa­ter bid round that took place un­der the for­mer PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion, call­ing it a dis­as­ter. He said eight blocks were put out for bids, with on­ly one tak­er. The min­is­ter said that bid round neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed T&T's abil­i­ty to at­tract com­pa­nies to drill in the fron­tier province.

The Busi­ness Guardian con­firmed that at least one of the world's largest oil and gas com­pa­nies, with sig­nif­i­cant ex­pe­ri­ence in the deep­wa­ter, will not be bid­ding in this round and has no in­ter­est in the deep­wa­ter around T&T.

Six blocks on of­fer:

• TTDAA 1

• TTDAA 5

• TTDAA 6

• TTDAA 28

• TTDAA 29

• Block 25(a)

On av­er­age, the blocks ex­ceed 100,000 hectares and are lo­cat­ed in wa­ter depths rang­ing be­tween 600 me­tres and 1,500 me­tres, the min­istry said. On March 29, Cab­i­net ap­proved the Min­istry of En­er­gy to en­ter in­to the 2010 deep­wa­ter bid­ding round. The pe­tro­le­um reg­u­la­tions deep­wa­ter com­pet­i­tive bid­ding round 2012 was signed by Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Kevin Ram­nar­ine on April 5, and Gazetted as Le­gal No­tice No 48 of 2012. Ram­nar­ine said this meant the bid round was legal­ly opened since March 5, will be closed on Ju­ly 30, and a de­ci­sion will be made by Oc­to­ber 30.