PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Pos­i­tive mo­men­tum is build­ing in the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor in 2026, dri­ven by grow­ing ex­pec­ta­tions as more oil and gas projects are sched­uled to come on stream this year and in 2027.

Chair of the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T, Mala Bali­raj, high­light­ed many of these projects in her open­ing ad­dress at the 2026 T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

“We have seen some projects be­ing com­plet­ed and mov­ing to be­gin pro­duc­tion, no­tably the bpTT Cypre project and the EOG/bpTT joint ven­ture Men­to project. Trinidad’s first grid-scale re­new­ables project, the Brechin Cas­tle so­lar farm, al­so be­gan pro­duc­ing green elec­trons in 2025,” said Bali­raj in her ad­dress.

“These projects join oth­ers al­ready in ex­e­cu­tion and work­ing to­wards first pro­duc­tion. These in­clude the EOG/bpTT Co­conut project, which is in ex­e­cu­tion with the plat­form be­ing con­struct­ed in the TOF­CO yard. And bpTT’s fourth sub­sea project, Gin­ger, is al­so on sched­ule to de­liv­er first gas in 2027.

“The biggest project in ex­e­cu­tion is the Shell Man­a­tee, set to come on­stream at the end of 2027. By all re­ports, ex­e­cu­tion of these ma­jor projects are all pro­ceed­ing as planned: im­por­tant news for the down­stream gas in­dus­try.”

Bali­raj said the in­dus­try had been buoyed by the Gov­ern­ment’s work to speed up nec­es­sary ap­provals to al­low work on these projects, which was al­so a pos­i­tive in­di­ca­tor.

She added, “Get­ting in­vest­ment de­ci­sions made on these and oth­er up­stream projects re­mains the most im­por­tant el­e­ment to se­cure the fu­ture of Trinidad’s en­er­gy sec­tor. In re­cent months, we have seen the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy place a firm fo­cus on ac­cel­er­at­ing ap­provals in the en­er­gy sec­tor, cul­mi­nat­ing in the wel­come news of the Cab­i­net’s de­ci­sion to es­tab­lish an over­sight com­mit­tee, the En­er­gy Ac­cel­er­a­tor Hub.

“It is heart­en­ing to see a fo­cus placed on this area, and it aligns with our ad­vo­ca­cy po­si­tion over the years. The En­er­gy Cham­ber re­mains ful­ly com­mit­ted to work­ing with the Gov­ern­ment on that process.”

Bali­raj stat­ed, how­ev­er, that there were oth­er steps that could im­prove en­er­gy re­turns fur­ther.

“In ad­di­tion to ac­cel­er­at­ing the ap­provals process, oth­er changes could help in­vest­ment de­ci­sions be made for some of the dis­cov­ered but un­de­vel­oped fields. Fis­cal re­form re­mains an es­sen­tial el­e­ment for some fields, es­pe­cial­ly small and mar­gin­al gas fields where a tiered ap­proach may be re­quired. These are pol­i­cy de­ci­sions with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s con­trol, and we look for­ward to pro­duc­tive di­a­logue on these with the rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers,” Bali­raj said.

Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration’s Paul Baay agreed that the sec­tor is in a good place, as he ex­plained that the min­istry’s ac­cel­er­a­tion of ap­provals had brought up the date of po­ten­tial re­turns from the com­pa­ny’s re­cent drilling of on­shore wells at Cen­tral Block.

“I think the key thing there is, be­cause we’re on­shore, some of our projects can get turned around quick­er, like we can phys­i­cal­ly drill a well and get it in pro­duc­tion much quick­er than some of these big off­shore ones. So the new Gov­ern­ment is recog­nis­ing that and helped us with ap­provals, like cer­tifi­cates for en­vi­ron­men­tal com­pli­ance,” Baay said.

“We drilled the first well. We want to drill a sec­ond well, re­al­ly quick­ly. That process, you know, used to be a nine-month process, and it’s been shrunk down. Now it looks like it’s go­ing to be lit­er­al­ly a cou­ple of weeks, maybe a month.”

Baay added that the com­pa­ny could see some re­turns from that ac­tiv­i­ty by the end of Feb­ru­ary.

“We drilled the first well in De­cem­ber at the cen­tral block, and that’s go­ing to come on at the end of Feb­ru­ary. So you know that’s like, we’re not talk­ing quar­ters here. We’re talk­ing months and weeks from when we can drill a well to when we get it on pro­duc­tion,” he said.

Baay said, “Those are the kind of re­ac­tion times that I think the new Gov­ern­ment is recog­nis­ing and putting in place the nec­es­sary things that we see. So from our point of view, that saves us mon­ey and saves us time. From the Gov­ern­ment’s point of view, that gets mol­e­cules on quick­er for all of those sup­pli­ers that need them.”