The Min­istry of En­er­gy says it wel­comes the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of ap­praisal op­er­a­tions for Peren­co Trinidad and To­ba­go Ltd’s (Peren­co) Onyx Field with gas bear­ing sands en­coun­tered.

The Onyx Field was pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cov­ered through ex­plo­ration drilling off­shore South East Trinidad in the Colum­bus Basin be­tween the Teak and Poui fields.

“This field is op­er­at­ed by Peren­co with a 70 per cent work­ing in­ter­est. Ap­praisal drilling of this field com­menced on Jan­u­ary 17, 2025 via the drilling of the ap­praisal well ONYX-02B01 and its planned side­track,” the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries said in a state­ment.

Ear­li­er this week, Peren­co said that found “sig­nif­i­cant columns” of nat­ur­al gas in two sep­a­rate ge­o­log­i­cal com­part­ments on the east­ern part of the Onyx field, an un­de­vel­oped gas.

In a state­ment, Peren­co said the gas dis­cov­ery was found at a depth of 180 feet, be­tween the Poui and Teak fields and that it is cur­rent­ly re­view­ing sub­sur­face in­for­ma­tion.

“De­vel­op­ment op­tions are ex­pect­ed to be eval­u­at­ed to move the dis­cov­ery to­ward a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion,” it said.

“Our ob­jec­tive was to prove suf­fi­cient gas re­serves to un­lock field de­vel­op­ment. The wells’ find­ings are tes­ti­mo­ny to the hy­dro­car­bon po­ten­tial which re­mains in the TSP acreage and high­lights Peren­co’s com­mit­ment to pro­vide fu­ture sup­plies of nat­ur­al gas to Trinidad and To­ba­go,” said Peren­co’s gen­er­al man­ag­er, Gre­goire De Cour­celles, who de­scribed the dis­cov­ery as a ma­jor mile­stone in the com­pa­ny’s vi­sion for TT.

The Teak, Poui and Samaan fields (TSP) are un­der li­cence by a joint ven­ture be­tween Peren­co TT, Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Co Ltd and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC).

In its state­ment, the min­istry said it “views these find­ings as a very pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ment for T&T’s en­er­gy sec­tor as we con­tin­ue to work with stake­hold­ers such as Peren­co to max­imise the pro­duc­tion of our nat­ur­al re­sources for the ben­e­fit of the cit­i­zens of the Re­pub­lic of T&T”