Trinidad and To­ba­go can ex­pect to see a boost in its sup­ply of crude oil and fur­ther sta­bil­i­ty in its nat­ur­al gas sup­ply as the Block 3(a) Ru­by de­vel­op­ment project be­gins pro­duc­tion ahead of sched­ule.

This was the state­ment from the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) yes­ter­day in re­sponse to the an­nounce­ment by BHP T&T on Tues­day that it has re­alised first oil pro­duc­tion from its off­shore Ru­by Field.

First gas is ex­pect­ed to oc­cur soon, NGC stat­ed yes­ter­day.

“On com­ple­tion of all de­vel­op­ment ac­tiv­i­ties lat­er this year, the Ru­by field is ex­pect­ed to pro­duce up to 16,000 gross bar­rels of oil per day and 80 mil­lion gross stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day,” NGC not­ed.

The Ru­by de­vel­op­ment is lo­cat­ed in Block 3(a) im­me­di­ate­ly east of the Greater An­gos­tu­ra Field. Through its sub­sidiary NGC E&P (Nether­lands) B.V., NGC is a joint ven­ture part­ner in the Ru­by Project with op­er­a­tor BHP.

In Ju­ly 2020, NGC and BHP signed a Gas Sales Con­tract al­low­ing NGC to pur­chase 100 per cent of the gas pro­duced from the Ru­by field to add to its ex­ist­ing port­fo­lio of nat­ur­al gas sup­ply.

NGC as a joint ven­ture part­ner is al­so en­ti­tled to a share of the field’s oil pro­duc­tion.

“This will be mar­ket­ed as part of its En­er­gy Mar­ket­ing and Trad­ing port­fo­lio, pro­vid­ing valu­able sup­ple­men­tal in­come to the Com­pa­ny,” NGC stat­ed.

NGC’s pres­i­dent Mark Lo­quan, said the achieve­ment on the Ru­by project,

to­geth­er with pos­i­tive news from oth­er pro­duc­ers, gives cause for op­ti­mism.

“NGC has been work­ing close­ly and con­sci­en­tious­ly with up­stream op­er­a­tors, both as a val­ue chain stake­hold­er and Joint Ven­ture part­ner in sev­er­al de­vel­op­ments, to ad­vance work pro­grammes and bring more gas in­to the pipeline. It is ex­treme­ly heart­en­ing to see that work bear­ing fruit,” Lo­quan said.

“The an­nounce­ment of first oil from Ru­by sig­nals im­por­tant progress on an im­por­tant project. We look for­ward to more pos­i­tive news from the field and ex­pect as­so­ci­at­ed gas pro­duc­tion which would con­tribute to fur­ther sta­bil­i­ty in sup­ply. This is promis­ing news for our down­stream sec­tor, for our Com­pa­ny, and for the coun­try,” he stat­ed.

NGC said its in­vest­ment stake in these up­stream projects has al­lowed it to deep­en its par­tic­i­pa­tion along the gas val­ue chain, and fur­ther its strate­gic ob­jec­tive of grow­ing the busi­ness and its im­pact with­in the en­er­gy sec­tor.