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Saturday, July 5, 2025

Range, Touchstone and Lease Operators get onshore blocks

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20140204

Range Re­sources Lim­it­ed, Lease Op­er­a­tors Lim­it­ed and Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration Inc have been award­ed blocks for oil and gas ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion from last year's on­shore bid round.En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine an­nounced the bid re­sults yes­ter­day dur­ing the T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence which is tak­ing place at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.The St Mary's (Moru­ga) block was award­ed to Lon­don-list­ed Range Re­sources, while the Rio Claro block went to Lease Op­er­a­tors and the Or­toire block to Toron­to-list­ed Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration Inc.In T&T's 2013 on­shore bid round, six en­er­gy com­pa­nies com­pet­ed for the rights to ex­plore and pro­duce oil and gas in three parts of Trinidad. The bid round opened on May 16 and closed on Oc­to­ber 31.AV Oil and Gas Lim­it­ed bid on Rio Claro and Or­toire. Glint En­er­gy LLC and Lease Op­er­a­tors bid on all three. Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration Inc bid on Or­toire. Range Re­sources Lim­it­ed and Trin­i­ty Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion plc bid on St Mary's. Ram­nar­ine said en­er­gy will be a ma­jor top­ic when Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar vis­its Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping in Bei­jing lat­er this month. He al­so said T&T'[s liqui­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) mar­ket will change af­ter the Pana­ma Canal is ex­pand­ed. Though the ex­act rank­ing varies from month to month on pro­duc­tion num­bers, T&T is one of the largest LNG pro­duc­ers in the world, fre­quent­ly fig­ur­ing among the top ten.

Asked how the Pana­ma Canal widen­ing will af­fect the T&T LNG busi­ness, the min­is­ter ex­plained: "It means that it will be eas­i­er to get LNG car­goes from here in­to Japan (and) Ko­rea, but it al­so means the Aus­tralian car­goes will come, so it will be a dou­ble-edged sword." Hov­er­ing around and above US$15 per mil­lion British ther­mal units (mmb­tu), LNG prices in Asia are of­ten the high­est in the world. The low­est prices are usu­al­ly found on the New York Mer­can­tile Ex­change (Nymex) at around US$5 per mmb­tu. From Point Fortin-based At­lantic LNG, T&T now ex­ports most of its spot car­goes to Ar­genti­na and Brazil.The min­is­ter said this dy­nam­ic could change. Al­so ad­dress­ing the con­fer­ence was Trin­i­ty Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion plc ex­ec­u­tive chair­man and founder Bruce Ding­wall who rec­om­mend­ed that T&T fol­low the Ecopetrol mod­el.Ecopetrol is the Colom­bian state-owned oil com­pa­ny, which, though new­er, has been more suc­cess­ful than T&T's Petrotrin. Ding­wall said since the play­ing field was lev­eled in Colom­bia, Ecopetrol has had to com­pete for blocks like any oth­er oil com­pa­ny and that coun­try's pro­duc­tion has grown ex­po­nen­tial­ly.

En­er­gy Cham­ber pres­i­dent Roger Pack­er said he is some­times asked if the con­fer­en­ceis just a talk shop or ac­tu­al­ly changes how the in­dus­try op­er­ates. He said he could say "with­out hes­i­ta­tion that the en­er­gy con­fer­ence does in­deed lead to change in the in­dus­try". The past few years have seen "very high lev­els of up­stream ac­tiv­i­ty in T&T," he said."Drilling ac­tiv­i­ty in par­tic­u­lar, has shown a very marked in­crease over the past two years, and we ex­pect that high lev­el of drilling ac­tiv­i­ty to con­tin­ue through 2014."The in­crease in drilling that we have seen has come about be­cause of pol­i­cy mea­sures in­tro­duced by the gov­ern­ment and specif­i­cal­ly the se­ries of fis­cal re­form mea­sures in­tro­duced in suc­ces­sive na­tion­al bud­gets be­tween 2010 and 2013."Pack­er added: "Dis­cus­sions at the en­er­gy con­fer­ence di­rect­ly feed in­to those pol­i­cy re­forms. In oth­er words, talk here in this room led to new drilling and there­fore new pro­duc­tion, new re­serves, new in­vest­ments, jobs and gov­ern­ment rev­enue."Mak­ing a plug for low­er tax­es for the oil and gas in­dus­try, Pack­er said while T&T has "seen some ex­cel­lent progress on fis­cal re­form, over the past few years, there are still many is­sues that need to be ad­dressed to en­sure that we have a vi­brant and com­pet­i­tive en­er­gy sec­tor to at­tract con­tin­ued in­vest­ment."


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