Joel Julien and Cur­tis Williams

bpTT has rub­bished a re­port in the Trinidad Ex­press News­pa­per that the chal­lenges at At­lantic LNG Train 1 are be­cause of in­fight­ing be­tween it­self and the ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er in the four LNG trains Roy­al Dutch Shell.

There is no “on­go­ing fight” be­tween us and the ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er of At­lantic LNG, bpTT said.

In fact, bpTT not­ed that it has been “work­ing close­ly” with the oth­er At­lantic LNG share­hold­ers as well as the Gov­ern­ment of T&T to ex­plore the re­struc­tur­ing of At­lantic LNG as it be­lieves “it of­fers an op­por­tu­ni­ty to im­prove op­er­at­ing ef­fi­cien­cy and com­mer­cial align­ment.”

“Con­trary to what has been re­port­ed by one me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tion, there is no ‘on­go­ing fight be­tween bp and the ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er of At­lantic LNG,” bpTT stat­ed.

Roy­al Dutch Shell and BP are the main share­hold­ers in At­lantic. The gov­ern­ment’s ex­ist­ing mi­nor­i­ty in­ter­est is through the state-owned Nat­ur­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC).

“It is our goal to ar­rive at an out­come that im­proves val­ue to the coun­try while en­sur­ing we have a com­pet­i­tive en­er­gy sec­tor that can con­tin­ue to at­tract the in­vest­ments re­quired to keep the pro­duc­tion pro­file need­ed to sat­is­fy down­stream and LNG de­mand,” it stat­ed.

In an emailed re­sponse to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia Shell was equal­ly dis­mis­sive of the sug­ges­tion.

It said, “Shell to­geth­er with At­lantic, its fel­low share­hold­ers and the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go have been work­ing co-op­er­a­tive­ly on the com­mer­cial re­struc­tur­ing of At­lantic with a view to en­sur­ing the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the en­ti­ty as a world class LNG fa­cil­i­ty.”

It added that re­struc­tur­ing will en­able longer term in­vest­ments in the Up­stream sec­tor and in At­lantic. Once con­clud­ed, we be­lieve that this will be a sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment, not just for share­hold­ers, but for the Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go as we se­cure a fu­ture for the lo­cal sec­tor in our chang­ing world.

The Guardian last Sat­ur­day re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly that Train 1 will be moth­balled for at least two years as there is no gas for it and will like­ly mean that the NGC would lose its quar­ter bil­lion dol­lar in­vest­ment. The sto­ry has not been de­nied by ei­ther the NGC or gov­ern­ment.

NGC pumped $250 mil­lion in an at­tempt to keep the plant run­ning de­spite the ma­jor share­hold­ers in­sist­ing that they did not have nat­ur­al gas to sup­port the plant and that the multi­na­tion­als would not put a cent fur­ther in keep­ing it alive.

“In terms of gas sup­ply, fol­low­ing the dis­ap­point­ing re­sults from our 2019 in­fill drilling pro­gram we have since re­fo­cused our pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tions on max­i­miz­ing pro­duc­tion from our ex­ist­ing fields in the short-term, ac­tive­ly tak­ing mea­sures to off­set nat­ur­al de­clines. Even though these fac­tors helped pro­duc­tion at the be­gin­ning of 2020, nat­ur­al de­clines con­tin­ue to be a chal­lenge as we man­age our gas de­liv­er­abil­i­ty for 2021,” bpTT stat­ed.

On Sat­ur­day the En­er­gy Min­istry stat­ed that the Gov­ern­ment has been in dis­cus­sions with all of the share­hold­ers for months con­cern­ing the fu­ture of At­lantic LNG.

“These dis­cus­sions are on­go­ing and at a very sen­si­tive stage,” the En­er­gy Min­istry stat­ed.

The En­er­gy Min­istry’s state­ment came in re­sponse to a Guardian Me­dia re­port that At­lantic LNG’s Train 1 plant will be moth­balled in the com­ing weeks and could stay out of ser­vice for at least two years.

On Fri­day bpTT’s Cas­sia C plat­form ar­rived in T&T from Mex­i­co.

Cas­sia C will be bpTT’s 16th off­shore in­stal­la­tion and its first off­shore com­pres­sion fa­cil­i­ty.

It will be in­stalled next to its Cas­sia A and B fa­cil­i­ties.