Gas shar­ing ar­rnge­ments be­tween T&T and Venezuela in the Lo­ran/Man­a­tees fields is ex­pect­ed to be high on the agen­da when Venezuela's Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro ar­rives to­day for a work­ing meet­ing. The ex­pec­ta­tion is that stalled ne­go­ti­a­tions on de­vel­op­ing nat­ur­al gas fields that strad­dle the mar­itime bor­der be­tween the two coun­tries will be re­vived.

Maduro, who ar­rives at 11 am, is due to meet with Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine to dis­cuss the work of tech­ni­cal com­mit­tees es­tab­lished last year to ad­vance the gas shar­ing agree­ment.In 2007, the two coun­tries en­tered in­to a draft agree­ment on shar­ing gas de­posits es­ti­mat­ed to hold a to­tal of 22.65 tril­lion ft� in three fields. How­ev­er, sev­er­al rounds of dis­cus­sion since then have not re­sult­ed a de­fin­i­tive ar­rang­ment for cross-bor­der gas shar­ing.

A draft agree­ment signed in Sep­tem­ber 2013 al­lo­cat­ed an es­ti­mat­ed 10.25 tril­lion ft� of gas re­serves in the Lo­ran-Man­a­tee field, with 7.56 tril­lion ft�, of the field's re­serves as­signed to Venezuela and the re­main­ing 2.69 tril­lion ft�, was ear­marked for T&T.

US en­er­gy-gi­ant Chevron al­ready has a li­cense from Venezuela to ex­tract gas from the Platafor­ma Deltana com­plex that cov­ers Lo­ran and is al­so in a joint ven­ture with BG for the Man­a­tee field on the Trinidad side of the bor­der. The two gov­ern­ments have pro­vi­sion­al­ly agreed that 70 per cent of the 5 tril­lion ft� Kapok-Do­ra­do field lies on the T&T side but they are yet to de­cide on the 7.4 tril­lion ft� Man­akin-Co­quina cross-bor­der field.

In­sid­ers said no progress has been on the mar­ket­ing of the gas. T&T wants to liq­ue­fy and mar­ket the gas through At­lantic LNG but Venezuela is pressed to bring the cross-bor­der gas to its Cig­ma in­dus­tri­al com­plex. Cig­ma is part of state-owned PdV�s planned 1.2bn ft3/d Mariscal Su­cre off­shore gas project.

PdV has con­tract­ed Italy's Saipem in 2011 to build a 110km sub­sea pipeline run­ning from the planned 600mn ft3/d plat­form at the Drag­on field in the Gulf of Paria to Cig­ma, where the com­pa­ny wants to build a liq­ue­fac­tion plant. The pipeline project is be­hind sched­ule, ap­par­ent­ly be­cause of a lack of pay­ment, but has since re­sumed and is now at an ad­vanced stage.

PdV has said it plans to start pro­duc­ing up to 100mn ft3/d of Mariscal Su­cre gas in first quar­ter of this year, ramp­ing up to 300mn ft3/d by mid-2015. The project should reach peak first stage out­put of 600mn ft3/d by mid-2016.It is be­lieved that the fi­nan­cial­ly strapped Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment may now be will­ing to trans­fer its share of the cross-bor­der gas to T&T in or­der to mon­e­tise it as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.

While there may not be fi­nal­i­sa­tion of an agree­ment, the ex­pec­ta­tion is that sig­nif­i­cant progress will be made on how the gas de­posits in Lo­ran-Man­a­tee will be ex­ploit­ed.