PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

En­er­gy ex­perts are not sur­prised that Chevron has reached out to T&T due to its in­fra­struc­ture and ge­og­ra­phy.

Over the week­end, Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, re­vealed the US En­er­gy com­pa­ny had shown in­ter­est in open­ing dis­cus­sions with T&T.

En­er­gy Ex­pert An­tho­ny “Tony” Paul said the Chevron in­quiry should not come as a sur­prise giv­en its ac­tiv­i­ty in neigh­bour­ing coun­tries Venezuela, Guyana and Suri­name.

“Their eyes are on this part of the world, in the South­ern Caribbean. So it’s not sur­pris­ing that peo­ple’s eyes turned here, be­cause the Chevron has op­er­a­tions in Guyana and Suri­name,” Paul said, adding, “And Trinidad ge­ol­o­gy is part of the East­ern Venezue­lan basin, and the oil things are sim­i­lar. So it’s not sur­pris­ing.”

Paul point­ed out that Chevron did have op­er­a­tions in Trinidad decades ago, but he was not cur­rent­ly clear on the ex­act scope of Chevron’s cur­rent in­ter­est.

The ex­pert said ul­ti­mate­ly it would be up to the Min­is­ter to re­veal those de­tails, but not­ed that T&T’s in­fra­struc­ture does of­fer some op­por­tu­ni­ty to the en­er­gy gi­ant.

“I think their fo­cus may have been on us­ing the tanks for stor­age in Pointe-a-Pierre and per­haps Point Fortin. So that may have been a dif­fer­ent con­sid­er­a­tion from what the min­is­ter said. So, I’m not sure whether it was just the ex­plo­ration po­ten­tial or just the trad­ing po­ten­tial of us­ing our in­fra­struc­ture fa­cil­i­ties at the Point-a-Pierre re­fin­ery,” said Paul, who ex­plained it was un­like­ly the com­pa­ny would get in­volved in re­fin­ery op­er­a­tions as most ma­jor en­er­gy com­pa­nies had moved away from that busi­ness due to low mar­gins.

He ex­plained, “The peo­ple who are in­vest­ing in a re­fin­ery will like­ly want to have ac­cess to that stor­age. So again, it flips the switch in terms of is every­one in­ter­est­ed in re­fin­ery? All ma­jor oil com­pa­nies have lim­it­ed their ex­po­sure to re­fin­ing, sim­ply be­cause the re­fin­ing busi­ness is a much low­er-mar­gin busi­ness than ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion. So al­though the big oil com­pa­nies still have gas sta­tions across the world, they tend to have got­ten out large­ly from the re­fin­ing busi­ness.”

How­ev­er, for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan said Chevron’s in­ter­est could be tied to an agree­ment in place be­fore US sanc­tions changed plans for this coun­try’s cross-bor­der gas fields, es­pe­cial­ly the Lo­ran/Man­a­tee.

“As we all know, this reser­voir strad­dles the bound­ary be­tween the two coun­tries and was orig­i­nal­ly gov­erned by a uni­ti­sa­tion agree­ment ex­e­cut­ed in 2010, which fa­cil­i­tat­ed the joint de­vel­op­ment by Chevron on the Venezue­lan Lo­ran side and Shell on the Trinidad Man­a­tee side. Uni­ti­sa­tion is the stan­dard pre­ferred pe­tro­le­um en­gi­neer­ing ap­proach for cross-bor­der reser­voirs be­cause it pre­vents com­pet­i­tive drilling, max­imis­ing to­tal gas re­cov­ery and avoids the cost of du­pli­ca­tion of in­fra­struc­ture. How­ev­er, US sanc­tions on Venezuela made joint de­vel­op­ment im­prac­ti­cal, and as a re­sult, the field was ef­fec­tive­ly de-uni­tised, al­low­ing each coun­try to de­vel­op its own share in­de­pen­dent­ly,” said Seep­er­sad-Bachan.

The for­mer min­is­ter said talks could be cen­tred around a new ver­sion of that arrange­ment, but it could be com­pli­cat­ed by the progress made by Shell, with first gas from Man­a­tee ex­pect­ed next year.

“Trinidad has al­ready struc­tured the Man­a­tee de­vel­op­ment in­de­pen­dent­ly and would not wish to de­lay pro­duc­tion time­lines to fa­cil­i­tate re-uni­ti­sa­tion giv­en the coun­try’s ur­gent need for a new gas sup­ply. A more re­al­is­tic path­way may there­fore be a more phased ap­proach. Trinidad pro­ceeds with Man­a­tee phase 1 in­de­pen­dent­ly se­cur­ing first gas and if US li­cens­es and ex­pands and Chevron be­comes more ac­tive­ly in­volved again in Venezuela, dis­cus­sions could be­gin on co-or­di­nat­ed de­vel­op­ment of the Lo­ran field,” she said.

“Over time, both sides could adopt a func­tion­al or par­tial uni­ti­sa­tion mod­el where pro­duc­tion is co­or­di­nat­ed with­out re­open­ing the full le­gal uni­ti­sa­tion agree­ment. In that sce­nario, Trinidad’s At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ties could po­ten­tial­ly act as a tolling hub to process gas from Venezuela’s Lo­ran re­serves, max­imis­ing the val­ue of the en­tire cross-bor­der re­source while main­tain­ing Trinidad in­fra­struc­ture as a re­gion­al pro­cess­ing cen­tre,” said Seep­er­sad-Bachan.