Cur­tis Williams

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine is promis­ing that over the next two years, more nat­ur­al gas will come on stream and the tight re­la­tion­ship be­tween sup­ply and de­mand will ease.

"We ex­pect Starfish to come on around Sep­tem­ber/Oc­to­ber. I have to crunch the num­bers again, but I ex­pect us to be in a pos­i­tive sit­u­a­tion with Starfish com­ing on with that quan­tum of gas," Ram­nar­ine told the Busi­ness Guardian.

Starfish is a field dis­cov­ered by BG T&T in 1998, and which is ex­pect­ed to be de­vel­oped by the end of the year and bring gas in­to pro­duc­tion.

In an in­ter­view fol­low­ing liqui­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) pro­duc­er At­lantic's award din­ner at the Hilton Trinidad, the En­er­gy Min­is­ter added, "Go­ing for­ward, we have to con­tin­ue to do a num­ber of things. BHP is go­ing to be do­ing An­gos­tu­ra Phase III, which will bring on more gas and we ex­pect that from all the in­fill drilling that BP has in the next two years, more gas will be made avail­able and, of course, we have Ju­niper."

Ram­nar­ine es­ti­mat­ed that Starfish will pro­duce at a plateau rate of about 250 mil­lion cu­bic feet, while An­gos­tu­ra Phase III will add an­oth­er 100 mil­lion cu­bic feet of gas to T&T's gas grid.

Starfish alone would add six per cent to T&T's to­tal gas pro­duc­tion, he said.

Ram­nar­ine's com­ments fol­low re­ports that nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment was cost­ing the trea­sury mil­lions of US dol­lars in po­ten­tial tax rev­enues as pro­duc­tion in the down­stream sec­tor was re­duced due to a short­age of gas.

It has been three years now that the down­stream sec­tor has been clam­our­ing for more nat­ur­al gas. Ram­nar­ine had promised an ease in the short­age when bpTT's ma­jor main­te­nance work was over. That work came to an end in the last quar­ter of 2013 and while there have been im­prove­ments there still isn't suf­fi­cient to meet the de­mands of the down­stream pro­duc­ers.