In the third quar­ter of 2013 the en­er­gy sec­tor un­der­went a se­ries of planned main­te­nance in­ter­ven­tions that in­volved bpTT and BG tak­ing bpTT Cas­sia B hub and BG Dol­phin fa­cil­i­ties of­fline.These turn­arounds were co-or­di­nat­ed with At­lantic's Train 3 and nine ma­jor plants at the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate. This con­sti­tut­ed the largest co-or­di­nat­ed main­te­nance ef­fort in the his­to­ry of the na­tion­al en­er­gy sec­tor.These main­te­nance events were planned well in ad­vance with plan­ning works in some cas­es dat­ing back to 2012.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs was cen­tral to the plan­ning and co-or­di­na­tion of these main­te­nance events and col­lab­o­rat­ed with BP at the high­est lev­els of that or­gan­i­sa­tion with the ob­jec­tive of mit­i­gat­ing the im­pact on the econ­o­my.

This main­te­nance pro­gramme and its im­pact on nat­ur­al gas sup­ply were com­mu­ni­cat­ed to var­i­ous agen­cies in­clud­ing the Cen­tral Bank, the Min­istry of Fi­nance and the Econ­o­my and the me­dia well in ad­vance. At no time was the sup­ply of nat­ur­al gas to pow­er gen­er­a­tion com­pa­nies im­pact­ed.

While the Cen­tral Bank has re­port­ed in its Mon­e­tary Pol­i­cy An­nounce­ment, No­vem­ber 2013, that the en­er­gy sec­tor con­tract­ed by four per cent in the third quar­ter of 2013, that this was an­tic­i­pat­ed. The im­pact would have been much worse had it not been for the co-or­di­nat­ed ef­forts of the min­istry, BP, BG, At­lantic, NGC and the Point Lisas En­er­gy As­so­ci­a­tion (PLEA).

The main­te­nance pro­gramme is now com­plet­ed and has sur­passed ex­pec­ta­tions in terms of per­for­mance. In the case of the largest in­stal­la­tion, the BP Cas­sia B hub the main­te­nance pro­gramme was com­plet­ed 25 days ahead of sched­ule. The min­istry wish­es to em­pha­sise that these main­te­nance events were crit­i­cal­ly nec­es­sary for the long term in­tegri­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the en­er­gy sec­tor.

The as­sets that un­der­pin our coun­try's en­er­gy sec­tor re­quire pe­ri­od­ic main­te­nance to en­sure the long-term re­li­a­bil­i­ty and de­liv­er­abil­i­ty of nat­ur­al gas to all stake­hold­ers.The main­te­nance pro­gramme in the up­stream nat­ur­al gas sec­tor is now large­ly com­plet­ed. This au­gurs well for nat­ur­al gas sup­ply in 2014.