Nadaleen Singh

Im­proved in­dus­try da­ta is es­sen­tial for T&T's en­er­gy sec­tor to be­come more glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive, says David Bor­de, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Petro­Com Tech­nolo­gies Lim­it­ed. He said da­ta ac­quired over the life of the en­er­gy in­dus­try in T&T needs to be in­te­grat­ed.

Bor­de, a geo­physi­cist, spent 25 years in Hous­ton be­fore re­turn­ing to T&T to es­tab­lish Petro­Com Tech­nolo­gies eight years ago. He told the T&T Guardian he is not sat­is­fied with the qual­i­ty of da­ta on the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor.

"Our da­ta is still not as or­gan­ised as it could or should be. Once we get that done it would re­al­ly help fur­ther en­er­gise the in­dus­try be­cause in turn we can make bet­ter de­ci­sions. It re­duces un­cer­tain­ty and risk."

He said said the fact that "we don't have a clear de­f­i­n­i­tion where we are with re­serves," caus­es a lot of con­fu­sion.

"Re­mem­ber we have dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies here from dif­fer­ent coun­tries and their re­port­ing meth­ods are dif­fer­ent. That does not add up to what we read in the news­pa­pers. We get these sum­maries that are re­port­ed on an an­nu­al ba­sis.

Bor­de, who spoke dur­ing work­shop host­ed by his com­pa­ny dur­ing the T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence, which took place ear­li­er this week at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain, is plan­ning to con­sult with in­dus­try stake­hold­ers to get in­put on im­prov­ing en­er­gy da­ta.

"Da­ta is one of the biggest dri­vers of this busi­ness. We need to mod­ern­ize how we store, make that da­ta ac­ces­si­ble, how we share that da­ta. Every­thing is re­al­ly about da­ta in this in­dus­try.

Bor­de, in de­scrib­ing the poor state of T&T's en­er­gy da­ta, ex­plained: "We have had over 15,000 wells drilled . . . but it is not tru­ly in­te­grat­ed and made ac­ces­si­ble so the in­dus­try can be made glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive. That's one of the big is­sues we ad­dress every­day–how do we keep this in­dus­try more glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive?"

He said dur­ing his time work­ing in Hous­ton, he worked with seis­mic, pro­duc­tion and well log da­ta.

"We can't be stor­ing da­ta in box­es and things like that. We have to mine our da­ta. We have every­thing in place. Even though there is a down­turn, T&T can im­prove its po­si­tion but we've got to get mod­ern."

Bor­de said Petro­Com Tech­nolo­gies was es­tab­lished to make suit­able tech­nol­o­gy avail­able to the en­er­gy sec­tor.

"We see our­selves as a lo­cal­ly struc­tured com­pa­ny serv­ing the re­gion. We are even do­ing projects for West Africa. We are based in T&T, we use T&T ex­per­tise and glob­al tech­nolo­gies," he said.

"We have helped the (En­er­gy) Min­istry with prepa­ra­tion for bid rounds with the screen­ing and high grad­ing of their seis­mic da­ta. We have done projects with vir­tu­al­ly all the oil com­pa­nies to do rapid analy­sis of their seis­mic da­ta so they can ad­vance the work­flow with how they in­ter­pret seis­mic da­ta. We al­so help them with seis­mic projects.

Bor­de said the com­pa­ny will soon be in­tro­duc­ing tech­nol­o­gy lo­cal­ly which will "make big dif­fer­ence with pro­duc­tion." He ex­plained that the tech­nol­o­gy, Blue Spark, is a pro­duc­tion stim­u­la­tion method for en­er­gy reser­voirs.