En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young says he’s not sur­prised that by the poor re­sponse to the 2022 T&T deep-wa­ter bid round with on­ly four of the 17 blocks tak­en.

Speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia at the Hy­att Re­gency where the clos­ing took place yes­ter­day Young said,” As I said on the out­set when we were go­ing out for this bid round, I nev­er ex­pect­ed there to be a lot of ex­ter­nal in­ter­est be­cause the way the glob­al en­er­gy sec­tor is set up now, that a lot of these multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies have ac­tu­al­ly been forced by their share­hold­ers to take de­ci­sions that you can­not in­vest in new provinces.”

He em­pha­sised that the mat­ter needs to be seen in that con­text.

But the min­is­ter said the fact that four of the blocks were ac­tu­al­ly tak­en up by a con­sor­tium of bpTT and Shell “is a great pos­i­tive” for the coun­try.

“So, there’s noth­ing sur­pris­ing there,” Young added.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he said this bid round means that a lot of cap­i­tal will be placed to de­vel­op the deep-wa­ter, not­ing that the next bid round to come will be the on­shore bid round.

“And there’s go­ing to be a lot more in­ter­est there be­cause on­shore is a lot cheap­er to ex­plore and pro­duce,” Young said.

On why the min­istry there­fore, opt­ed to go for deep-wa­ter bid rounds first as op­posed to on­shore Young said the deep-wa­ter is the province which needs the in­ter­est for ex­plo­ration.

“You’re look­ing at a longer point in time. We al­ready have a lot of on­shore and shal­low wa­ter. I think the last one that was done a few years ago was a shal­low wa­ter. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, that didn’t go so well. We want­ed to see what would come out of the deep-wa­ter,” Young added.

On the con­sor­tium be­tween bp and Shell for the deep-wa­ter bid rounds the En­er­gy Min­is­ter said this was pos­i­tive, not­ing that these en­ti­ties are the main share­hold­ers of At­lantic LNG.

“So the fact that both of them are go­ing in­to the deep-wa­ter it makes eco­nom­ic sense be­cause the type of in­fra­struc­ture; it is a vir­gin ter­ri­to­ry. The type of in­fra­struc­ture that needs to put down there it is bet­ter for Trinidad and To­ba­go with both of them go­ing to­geth­er. They are go­ing to share the cost to­geth­er,” Young added.

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