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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

bpTT urges engineers: Leave no hydrocarbons behind

by

20140609

T&T's largest hy­dro­car­bons pro­duc­er, bpTT, yes­ter­day urged pe­tro­le­um en­gi­neers to ex­tract all of the coun­try's oil and gas re­sources. Ad­dress­ing the open­ing of the So­ci­ety of Pe­tro­le­um En­gi­neers' 2014 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port of Spain, bpTT vice pres­i­dent for Reser­voir De­vel­op­ment Kei­th Bal­ly urged col­leagues twice dur­ing his speech to "en­sure we leave no hy­dro­car­bons be­hind."

He said: "Es­sen­tial­ly, we need to con­stant­ly find the bal­ance be­tween main­te­nance of ex­ist­ing re­sources and in­fra­struc­ture and the abil­i­ty to add new re­serves and in­te­grate new as­sets in­to the mix. Sim­ply put, en­sure we leave no hyr­do­car­bons be­hind. This is the re­al­i­ty for a ma­tur­ing province such as Trinidad, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Colum­bus Basin which I will be fo­cus­ing on this morn­ing."

Lat­er in his con­clu­sion, Bal­ly re­it­er­at­ed: "I hope I have been able to demon­strate that sig­nif­i­cant po­ten­tial and op­por­tu­ni­ty re­main, al­though the lo­cal in­dus­try faces a num­ber of chal­lenges in terms of de­vel­op­ment over the long term, to en­sure we leave no hy­dro­car­bons be­hind."

There is no need to re-in­vet­nt the wheel, he said: "Con­tin­ued de­vel­op­ment is di­rect­ly re­lat­ed to our abil­i­ty to max­imise re­cov­ery by un­der­stand­ing the be­low-the-ground fac­tors. At the same time, we must work to­wards an in­vest­ment cli­mate that would en­cour­age the in­dus­try to in­vest in the tech­nol­o­gy nec­es­sary for a long-term fu­ture.

"Giv­en the ex­per­tise that re­sides in this au­di­ence, there is no need to ex­plain the ge­ol­o­gy in de­tail."In the Colum­bus Basin, Bal­ly said, there is "a pro­lif­ic source rock, with a tec­ton­ic en­vi­ron­ment, that has al­lowed many trap­ping struc­tures with reser­voirs of high qual­i­ty. De­spite the fact that it is a ma­tur­ing province, the basin con­tin­ues to hold po­ten­tial."One ex­am­ple of that po­ten­tial has been BP's suc­cess at Savonette, he said. The Savonette 4 well, drilled in 2012 dou­bled gas in place es­ti­mates to 2 tril­lion cu­bic feet (TCF).

"It al­so led us to plan three fur­ther wells at Savonette. The sig­nif­i­cance of the Savonette dis­cov­ery is un­der­scored by the fact that the im­pact on pro­duc­tion has been rapid. We have since drilled Sav 5, 6 and Sav7 which in­ci­den­tal­ly was put on­line Fri­day and is ex­pect­ed o have ini­tial rates at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 140 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of gas per day (mm­scfd)," he said.

Bal­ly said the ocean bot­tom ca­ble seis­mic sur­vey com­plet­ed last year has giv­en bpTT re­newed in­sight in­to the Colum­bus basin. That im­proved knowl­edge is crit­i­cal to the com­pa­ny's un­der­stand­ing of the basin and will feed in­to its de­vel­op­ment plans, he said. In an­oth­er part of his speech, he said: "This is the re­al prize we are go­ing af­ter."

En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine, who fol­lowed Bal­ly with the fea­ture ad­dress, as­sured the au­di­ence that his plan is to of­fer in­cen­tives to oil and gas com­pa­nies to ex­tract the nat­ur­al gas from those "small stand­ed pools" that are not com­mer­cial­ly vi­able.

"There is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of nat­ur­al gas that re­mains un-com­mer­cial, and there­fore un-mon­e­tized be­cause it does not make eco­nom­ic sense," he said. On nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, Ram­nar­ine fore­cast that the coun­try will be able to main­tain its cur­rent "plateau rate" of 4.2 bil­lion cu­bic feet (BCF) per day un­til 2025.He said that num­ber is based on pro­jec­tions and fore­casts to which he has been privy from bpTT and BG, the two largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­ers in the coun­try.


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