GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

There has been a poor re­sponse to the 2022 T&T deep-wa­ter bid round with on­ly four of the 17 blocks re­ceiv­ing bids and those were sin­gle bids by a con­sor­tium of bpTT and Roy­al Dutch Shell.

It was a dis­ap­point­ing end to the six month process and the first deep-wa­ter bid round in close to a decade.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries had of­fered 17 blocks in the deep-wa­ter bid round and three quar­ter of the blocks went with­out a sin­gle bid.

In­ter­est­ing­ly BHP, now Wood­side Pe­tro­le­um, showed no in­ter­est in the deep-wa­ter blocks hav­ing ac­quired ex­ten­sive seis­mic in T&T’s deep-wa­ter and mak­ing nat­ur­al gas dis­cov­er­ies.

This lat­est dis­ap­point­ment comes as the Gov­ern­ment failed to de­liv­er a deep-wa­ter bid round, al­most eight years since it came to pow­er, and the last bid round in which bpTT and Shell were joint ven­ture part­ners and sole bid­ders have not seen an award made be­cause the bids were con­sid­ered too un­work­able by the Min­istry of En­er­gy.

There were bids were on Blocks 25(a) 25(b) 23 and 27 deep-wa­ter blocks .

Claire Fitz­patrick, Re­gion­al Pres­i­dent of bpTT, ex­plained to mem­bers of the me­dia the rea­son be­hind the con­sor­tium.

“It’s ac­tu­al­ly rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple. When you look at some of these deep-wa­ter projects, they come with risks and they are quite ex­pen­sive there­fore, it’s per­fect­ly nor­mal that you ac­tu­al­ly end up do­ing things in a con­sor­tium. And giv­en that both bp and Shell have got strong, in­cum­bent po­si­tions here and we both bring the skills to ac­tu­al­ly progress in deep-wa­ter projects it made per­fect sense for the two of us to ac­tu­al­ly come to­geth­er, and ac­tu­al­ly bid as a con­sor­tium,” Fitz­patrick said.

Stéphane Pi­car­le, Gen­er­al Man­ag­er, Com­mer­cial Shell T&T Ltd said the com­pa­ny was al­so de­light­ed to bid with bp, not­ing that join­ing forces could be ben­e­fi­cial in deep-wa­ter ex­plo­ration.

He added that the bid al­so demon­strat­ed the com­pa­ny’s com­mit­ment to T&T’s en­er­gy fu­ture and by ex­ten­sion, its cit­i­zens.

On whether more com­pe­ti­tion was ex­pect­ed, Fitz­patrick said she did not have any pre­con­ceived ideas as to which com­pa­nies would ac­tu­al­ly be in­ter­est­ed and how “things would line up” with the strate­gies of oth­er com­pa­nies.

“What I was in­ter­est­ed in was what did we think of the blocks, and did we see po­ten­tial there and we did be­cause we bid and strate­gi­cal­ly it made sense,” Fitz­patrick said, adding that she was ea­ger­ly an­tic­i­pat­ing the min­istry’s eval­u­a­tion.

On the at­trac­tive­ness to these four par­tic­u­lar blocks, she said like any ac­tiv­i­ty, it en­tailed prospec­tiv­i­ty.

“This is around what’s the risk as well as the po­ten­tial re­ward and they are the ones that are most at­trac­tive to us but we al­so saw some syn­er­gies with some oth­er ac­tiv­i­ties which we al­ready have in the re­gion,” Fitz­patrick fur­ther ex­plained.

On how soon the com­pa­ny thinks it can move through the phas­es from award, to ex­plo­ration and hope­ful­ly pro­duc­tion Fitz­patrick said she did not yet have an an­swer to that, but was con­fi­dent the com­pa­nies would work with the min­istry as there’s an aligned ob­jec­tive in safe­ly de­vel­op­ing what’s there and get­ting it to mar­ket as fast as pos­si­ble.

Pene­lope Brad­shaw Niles, Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary at the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, who al­so spoke at the bid round clos­ing said mak­ing ar­eas wide­ly avail­able is a goal of the Min­istry.

“Our goal is con­stant­ly to progress from hav­ing award of acreage to ex­plo­ration, to dis­cov­ery to pro­duc­tion,” she added.

She not­ed that pre­vi­ous deep-wa­ter ex­plo­ration had con­firmed a work­ing pe­tro­le­um sys­tem with­in these blocks.

Brad­shaw Niles al­so not­ed that these bid rounds are the first in three planned for 2021 in­to 2022 with the on­shore com­pet­i­tive bid round sched­uled to be launched lat­er this month and the shal­low wa­ter bid round sched­uled to be launched clos­er to the end of the year.

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