GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

The auc­tion for deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration blocks in T&T has yield­ed un­der­whelm­ing re­sults, with for­eign in­vestor in­ter­est falling short of ex­pec­ta­tions.

Of the 26 off­shore blocks made avail­able, bids were sub­mit­ted for on­ly four, sig­nalling a tepid re­sponse from the glob­al en­er­gy mar­ket.

Ul­tra Deep­wa­ter blocks, which were ini­tial­ly set to be part of the bid round, were re­moved from the process af­ter the re­cent­ly signed pro­duc­tion shar­ing agree­ment with Exxon­Mo­bil.

At the clos­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the bid round, which took place at the Min­istry of En­er­gy in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, it was con­firmed that nine com­pa­nies re­quest­ed da­ta pack­ages.

How­ev­er, Chi­na Na­tion­al Off­shore Oil Cor­po­ra­tion or CNOOC In­ter­na­tion­al, which sub­mit­ted bids for TTDAA 24, TTDAA 25, and TTDAA 30, and Niger­ian Com­pa­ny STIT En­er­gy and Ground Ports con­sor­tium, who bid for TTDAA 5, were the on­ly com­pa­nies that pushed on with their bids.

In re­sponse to the out­come, Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Ernesto Ke­sar pro­vid­ed ad­di­tion­al con­text and clar­i­fi­ca­tion re­gard­ing the bid round.

Re­spond­ing to me­dia ques­tions, he ad­dressed the ab­sence of ma­jor lega­cy play­ers like BP and Shell and the sig­nif­i­cance of the new en­trants.

“This bid round would have start­ed on Jan­u­ary 27, 2025, and would have been ex­tend­ed from Ju­ly to now. We are very pleased to see CNOOC be­cause we are aware of CNOOC and their glob­al foot­print. And with this STIT con­sor­tium, we are al­so very pleased to see the African com­pa­nies look­ing at our ul­tra-deep and deep­wa­ter basin with great an­tic­i­pa­tion. So we are sat­is­fied at this point in time, and hope­ful­ly when we go out next, we will be able to at­tract even more,” he said.

On how he felt about three bids from that one com­pa­ny, the min­is­ter said he felt “good,” adding that it meant that CNOOC “knows some­thing that we don’t know, and they are buy­ing, so we are very en­cour­aged.”

In his podi­um re­marks, Ke­sar not­ed that in 2025, in ad­di­tion to T&T, 20 coun­tries launched bid rounds, and oth­ers have in­di­cat­ed their in­ten­tion to do so in the near fu­ture.

In the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean re­gion, Ar­genti­na, Brazil, and Uruguay launched bid rounds, and both Guyana and Suri­name have sig­nalled their in­ten­tion to launch bid rounds in the fu­ture.

“This means that we are not the on­ly game in town, in an in­dus­try that is dom­i­nat­ed by a few ma­jor oil and gas com­pa­nies. We, there­fore, are re­al­is­tic in our ex­pec­ta­tions,” he said.

The min­is­ter al­so added that one of the key goals of the re­cent bid round was to en­cour­age new par­tic­i­pants in T&T’s up­stream sec­tor, adding that this aim has been suc­cess­ful­ly met.

He said that de­spite on­go­ing ef­forts, achiev­ing greater di­ver­si­ty with­in the up­stream sec­tor has proven to be a chal­lenge, not­ing that pri­or to the en­trance of Exxon­Mo­bil, there were no new ma­jor oil com­pa­nies in the ma­rine sec­tor for decades.

The deep­wa­ter and ul­tra deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion mar­ket, the min­is­ter added, is wit­ness­ing ro­bust growth, dri­ven by the glob­al pop­u­la­tion’s in­creas­ing de­mand for en­er­gy, ur­ban­i­sa­tion and in­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion in emerg­ing economies.

He said the mar­ket is ex­pect­ed to grow at a com­pound an­nu­al growth rate of 6.87 per cent from 2020 to 2030, reach­ing a stag­ger­ing US$96.27 bil­lion by the end of 2030.

“Glob­al deep­wa­ter spend­ing by ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al oil pro­duc­ers is fore­cast to grow to an av­er­age of US$79 bil­lion in 2026 and 2027, a 20 per cent hike from the av­er­age an­nu­al amount be­tween 2023 and 2025,” Ke­sar stat­ed.

Suc­cess­ful bid­ders are ex­pect­ed to be an­nounced three months af­ter the close of the bid round, with Pro­duc­tion Shar­ing Con­tracts to be ex­e­cut­ed with­in thir­ty days of no­ti­fi­ca­tion to the suc­cess­ful bid­ders.