The Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries has an­nounced that the long-await­ed 2018 shal­low wa­ter bid round will be launched in No­vem­ber as it has re­ceived Cab­i­net ap­proval.

This was con­firmed by Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary at the Min­istry, Pene­lope Brad­shaw Niles, who in a tele­phone in­ter­view said not on­ly will this bid round be launched in a few weeks but there are plans afoot to have two bid rounds next year in­clud­ing of­fer­ing some deep wa­ter blocks.

“We have got­ten Cab­i­net ap­proval for the blocks so I am ex­pect­ing that we will be able to launch in ear­ly No­vem­ber. In ad­di­tion we are al­ready work­ing on two bid rounds that we in­tend to have next year.

“A shal­low wa­ter and on­shore bid round and a Deep wa­ter bid round,” Brad­shaw-Niles told Busi­ness and Mon­ey.

The Gov­ern­ment will of­fer eight blocks to oil and gas com­pa­nies for bids to ex­plore, find and pro­duce oil and gas. Six of the blocks are lo­cat­ed in the shal­low wa­ter sur­round­ing Trinidad and two in Cen­tral Trinidad.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy doc­u­ment iden­ti­fies the Blocks to the of­fered as fol­lows:

1) &emp­mar­gin;Block 1B off the West Coast of Trinidad

2) Block Ub off the East Coat

3) &emp­mar­gin;Block Uc which is lo­cat­ed next to Ub and is al­so off the East Coast

4) &emp­mar­gin;Low­er Re­verse L Block that is off the East Coast

5) &emp­mar­gin;North Coast Ma­rine Area (NC­MA) 2 off the North Coast

6) NC­MA 3 al­so off the North Coast

The Min­istry will then take a pause and in phase two will of­fer the Charu­ma 1 and Charu­ma 2 blocks in the Cen­tral Range.

The Min­istry first an­nounced that the bid round will take place in the first quar­ter of 2018, that was then pushed back to the end of June, and now it has moved to No­vem­ber. It is ex­pect­ed that there will be sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est in the blocks since some are ex­pect­ed to be gas prone and with the short­age of nat­ur­al gas in the coun­try there will be an al­most guar­an­teed mar­ket for the gas.

Fur­ther the blocks are in shal­low wa­ter and there­fore less ex­pen­sive to ex­plore and de­vel­op than in the deep wa­ter.

The blocks are al­so lo­cat­ed rel­a­tive­ly close­ly to ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture, al­low­ing them to be quick­ly de­vel­oped if eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able dis­cov­er­ies are made and in the case of NC­MA 2 and NC­MA 3 they are close to NC­MA 4 which is op­er­at­ed by Roy­al Dutch Shell and is thought to con­tain nat­ur­al gas.

This is good news for the coun­try’s Petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor which re­lies on nat­ur­al gas to pro­duce its var­i­ous prod­ucts and has suf­fered sig­nif­i­cant loss­es due to the on­go­ing nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment.

One of the main rea­sons for the gas short­age has been a lack of in­vest­ment in the up­stream sec­tor at cru­cial times and this was made worse by the lack of suf­fi­cient bid rounds.

In fact this is the first bid round since 2014 even though the most ex­perts sug­gest that the coun­try should be hav­ing two bid rounds an­nu­al­ly.

Brad­shaw Niles said the blocks are main­ly gas prone and it re­flects the Min­istry’s at­tempts to in­crease nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion and to en­sure that the coun­try has suf­fi­cient re­serves.

With re­spect to the deep wa­ter, the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary said the Min­istry of En­er­gy feels now is a good time to of­fer deep wa­ter blocks be­cause of im­proved crude prices.

She told Busi­ness and Mon­ey: “It’s in part due to the suc­cess of the cur­rent deep wa­ter cam­paign but it is re­al­ly a com­bi­na­tion of sev­er­al things in­clud­ing the stronger prices which most ex­pect to con­tin­ue in­to next year.”