PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has con­firmed ex­ist­ing talks with ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy play­ers, amid in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports that Exxon­Mo­bil has be­gun ne­go­ti­a­tions with the gov­ern­ment to ex­plore for oil and gas in up to sev­en deep­wa­ter blocks off the East Coast of the coun­try.

Ac­cord­ing to a Reuters re­port pub­lished yes­ter­day, Exxon is in­ter­est­ed in deep­wa­ter blocks which are lo­cat­ed north of the com­pa­ny’s pro­lif­ic Stabroek block in Guyana.

Exxon­Mo­bil, through its pre­de­ces­sor com­pa­nies, had a pres­ence in T&T’s pe­tro­le­um in­dus­try for some time, with Exxon­Mo­bil Ex­plo­ration & Pro­duc­tion Trinidad Lim­it­ed no­tably sign­ing a pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tract in Feb­ru­ary 1998.

How­ev­er, their pre­vi­ous ex­plo­ration ini­tia­tives in the coun­try were ul­ti­mate­ly un­suc­cess­ful, lead­ing to the com­pa­ny’s de­ci­sion to cease op­er­a­tions in Trinidad and To­ba­go in 2003, be­fore its more re­cent re-en­gage­ment in po­ten­tial deep­wa­ter op­por­tu­ni­ties.

Dr Mooni­lal stopped short of nam­ing Exxon when asked on Tues­day about the de­vel­op­ment re­port­ed by Reuters, but con­firmed that ne­go­ti­a­tions were on­go­ing with in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy com­pa­nies.

“I can con­firm that the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries (MEEI) has on­go­ing talks with sev­er­al of the lead­ing glob­al en­er­gy cor­po­ra­tions with a view to repo­si­tion­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go as the en­er­gy hub of the Caribbean. This di­a­logue was ad­vanced by crit­i­cal meet­ings at the re­cent Suri­name Gas con­fer­ence. We are in dis­cus­sions with ma­jor play­ers to ramp up ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion with­in and out­side of bid rounds,” Dr Mooni­lal said.

The Min­is­ter added, “We have had favourable re­spons­es from sev­er­al oth­er lead­ing oil and gas gi­ants. Some­thing is hap­pen­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go—there is a resur­gence of in­vestor con­fi­dence.”

Mean­while, for­mer Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, Stu­art Young, has said that the Exxon­Mo­bil arrange­ment be­gan un­der his ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“XOM (the tick­er sym­bol for Exxon Mo­bil Cor­po­ra­tion) is one of sev­er­al of the world’s largest oil and gas com­pa­nies to have ex­pressed in­ter­est in our ul­tra deep­wa­ter,” he told Guardian Me­dia in a What­sApp re­sponse.

“I took a note to Cab­i­net ap­prov­ing the set­ting up of ne­go­ti­a­tion teams to ne­go­ti­ate ul­tra deep wa­ter blocks with Exxon in De­cem­ber 2024,” he added.

The for­mer min­is­ter was asked whether the ne­go­ti­a­tion team was set up and if it had start­ed work.

“Yes they were. And ne­go­ti­a­tions on PSC (Pub­lic Shar­ing Con­tract) terms were com­menced be­fore April 28, but I did not want to rush a note to Cab­i­net,” Young added.

While T&T cur­rent­ly has a deep­wa­ter bid round open, the Reuters re­port stat­ed that the blocks that Exxon­Mo­bil are in­ter­est­ed in are not on of­fer.

“Ac­cord­ing to Trinidad’s laws, the gov­ern­ment can in­di­vid­u­al­ly ne­go­ti­ate ar­eas for ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion if they are not in­clud­ed in a com­pet­i­tive bid­ding round,” the re­port said.

Exxon­Mo­bil has been suc­cess­ful in Guyana, where the com­pa­ny dis­cov­ered more than 11 bil­lion bar­rels of re­cov­er­able oil and gas in the Stabroek block with part­ners CNOOC and Hess, which has re­cent­ly been pur­chased by Chevron.

Exxon­Mo­bil first dis­cov­ered oil in Guyana in 2015 and be­gan pro­duc­ing in 2019.

The en­er­gy com­pa­ny has had over 30 dis­cov­er­ies off­shore Guyana, and has pro­ject­ed that they will pro­duce 900,000 bar­rels of oil per day by the end of this year and 1.2 mil­lion bar­rels of oil per day by 2027.

“If Exxon and Trinidad reach an agree­ment, the US pro­duc­er could ac­quire al­most all the ul­tra deep­wa­ter blocks that re­main un­li­censed”, Reuters re­port­ed.