Lead Editor Business
curtis.williams@guardian.co.tt
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley is expected to make a major announcement on oil and gas exploration success when he holds a news conference at the Diplomatic Centre this morning.
Sources have confirmed that the Prime Minister will reveal the good news at a joint news conference with the President BHP Billiton Trinidad, Vince Pereira and Minister of Energy Franklin Khan.
According to a media invite a live virtual press conference will be held to discuss the Return of the Invictus Deep Water drillship and the Drilling of the BHP deepwater Well Broadside- 1.
Earlier this year BHP’s Vice President, Exploration Sonia Scarselli in an exclusive interview with the Business Guardian spoke extensively about the Broadside well.
Scarselli said Broadside 1 would target a much deeper horizon.
She said: “So we will penetrate the shallowness of that interval where we encountered oil seeps in the Le Clerc and Victoria wells but we will now go drilling deeper than we have done in the past. Since we have a much larger understanding, a better understanding of the full hydrocarbon systems and potential for the area. In the Le Clerc well we encountered the oil seeps. So part of the well we will drill the next couple of months it is to test this oil potential.”
Scarselli said in the original Le Clerc well, the plan was to drill to relatively shallow depth but when there was gas and then oil seeps were found so the company decided to continue drilling given that it was a frontier basin and wild-cat exploration it wanted to take as much information as it could from the well and only stopped when the pressure came too much to continue. So now they have a better understanding of the geology BHP will take another look at the acreage.
BHP’s vice president, Exploration, said in the case of the North the company does not expect to find oil because she believes that the source rock is over mature.
“We tested that so we don’t expect to find any lead with that. In the South is a different story, so in the South, because we encountered the shallow section was biogenic so it was locally sourced. So expect to go deeper to find oil because we don’t think the oil has migrated shallow enough. It takes a certain amount of time for the oil to migrate through the rocks and because of the level of maturity in the south we don’t think it has migrated that shallow yet,” Scarselli said.
She said there are similarities and differences in the Guyana and T&T deep water and the company incorporated the information from Guyana to a mega-regional view of the basin. She said the source rock we have in T&T deepwater is a Cretaceous source rock in the Cenonian age which is similar to what there is in Guyana and most of the Central Atlantic.
She noted, however, in terms of the fold of play, there are differences. “There are differences in water systems and age compared with where we are looking, the main difference is the age of maturity of the source rock in Guyana vs T&T. So certainly we’ll learn a lot from the experience there but we’re also looking at different petroleum system overall,” Scarselli said.
Scarselli said BHP’s strategy is to target tier-one opportunities. She explained: “We want to find the traps so we can deliver multiple hundred million barrels of discovery. So that is like really the minimum threshold that we are looking and it could be a set of multiple traps that can deliver this amount. Normally when you open a new play you can find maybe some larger traps and smaller traps but necessarily you need to have quite a large amount to move forward with the development, because we are targeting large trap we are looking for the deepwater it is sort of numbers we are talking about,” Scarselli ended.
Today we will find out the extend of their success.