Curtis Williams
Chairman of the National Gas Company (NGC) Prof Gerry Brooks says the success of DeNovo in bringing on a small gas field in the Gulf of Paria is proof that the concept of small pool development can work in T&T.
Brooks said the NGC was going after small and marginal fields and intends to do so in the short term.
“It’s happening right now as we speak. We have done a number of things. One is DeNovo in which we have a 20 per cent stake and there is very clear, cogent and compelling evidence that it can work. That is an active part of our agenda now. DeNovo is very clear testimony that that is happening in 2018 and we have identified potential pools in the near term which we are working on,” Brooks said.
DeNovo is owned by Proman Group and NGC and is the operator of the Iguana field in the Gulf of Paria.
The issue of a small pool has been a thorny subject with fingers being pointed at large operators, in particular, bpTT, for producing large discoveries and leaving small pools in the ground, even at a time when the country desperately needs the gas.
Recently, energy consultant Tony Paul estimated there were 50 trillion cubic feet worth of small and marginal gas deposits in T&T waters. He said what was required is an upstream master gas plan that looks at the seismic studies, how much gas is in the ground, the pressure of the gas, how it’s being produced and how to maximise the amount taken out of the ground.
Paul said large companies produce gas until there was insufficient pressure to bring it to the surface but that is based on the pressure of the pipelines. In his view, the real cost of developing gas is in the drilling of the wells and construction of platforms and pipelines.
He argues that that varying levels of pipeline pressure are needed so that when the high-pressure gas is depleted, the low-pressure pipelines can get more to the surface at minimal additional costs.
Paul said the Government was not applying the law, therefore allowing companies to hold on to acreages they ought to return if they are not prepared to produce them.
Asked if he felt operators would be willing to give up acreages, Brooks said, “I think we have to find a mechanism that is a win-win mechanism because if you are sitting on two to five hundred billion standard cubic feet of gas and there is nothing you can do with it from an economic perspective and there are other operators who can come in and work with us in order to do that, I think it is very possible to have it done.
"If an operator is prepared to leave no molecule behind then the field is exhausted. If there are molecules available, one wouldn’t want to define this thing by one operator or another operator, so one has to look at the totality of the acreage. We have looked at the totality of the acreage, we have identified the available small and marginal pools and then there is a question, is there a coalition of the willing?
"Once there is a coalition of the willing and it makes economic sense then you begin to give priority to those and that is what we are doing."
Brooks said the NGC had already engaged geophysicist and geologists and Dr Stephen Babb was leading the company’s team on the project.
"It is a question of how do we sit with the ministry and how do we sit with the effective parties to work that process through, that ensures it is beneficial to them and in ways that are beneficial to Trinidad and Tobago," he said.