GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

Shell T&T Ltd, a sub­sidiary of Shell plc, an­nounced yes­ter­day that it has tak­en fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion (FID) on the Man­a­tee project, an un­de­vel­oped gas field in the East Coast Ma­rine Area (EC­MA).

In a news re­lease, Shell ex­plained Man­a­tee will al­low Shell to com­pet­i­tive­ly grow its in­te­grat­ed gas busi­ness by build­ing on de­vel­op­ment ef­forts in the EC­MA, one of the coun­try’s most pro­lif­ic gas-pro­duc­ing ar­eas.

The EC­MA is cur­rent­ly home to Shell’s largest gas-pro­duc­ing fields in the coun­try in­clud­ing Dol­phin, Starfish, Boun­ty and En­deav­our.

The multi­na­tion­al en­er­gy com­pa­ny not­ed the Man­a­tee gas field will pro­vide back­fill for the coun­try’s At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ty, stat­ing that in­creas­ing util­i­sa­tion at ex­ist­ing LNG plants is an im­por­tant lever to max­imise po­ten­tial from Shell’s ex­ist­ing as­sets.

“This project will help meet the in­creas­ing de­mand for nat­ur­al gas glob­al­ly while al­so ad­dress­ing the en­er­gy needs of our cus­tomers do­mes­ti­cal­ly in T&T. The in­vest­ment bol­sters our world-lead­ing LNG port­fo­lio in line with our com­mit­ment to in­vest in com­pet­i­tive projects that de­liv­er more val­ue with less emis­sions,” Zoë Yu­jnovich, Shell’s in­te­grat­ed gas and up­stream di­rec­tor fur­ther ex­plained.

Shell plans to grow its LNG busi­ness by 20-30 per cent by 2030, com­pared with 2022, and LNG liq­ue­fac­tion vol­umes are planned to grow by 25 to 30 per cent, rel­a­tive to 2022, as out­lined at Shell’s cap­i­tal mar­kets day in 2023.

Man­a­tee is slat­ed to start pro­duc­tion in 2027, while drilling is ex­pect­ed to com­mence in 2026.

Once on­line, Man­a­tee is ex­pect­ed to reach peak pro­duc­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 104,000 bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent per day (boe/d) (604 MM­scf/d).

Asked by Guardian Me­dia what hap­pens next, Shell said, “The Man­a­tee project will in­volve a Nor­mal­ly Un­at­tend­ed In­stal­la­tion plat­form in the EC­MA acreage with eight de­vel­op­men­tal wells via a 110 kilo­me­tre pipeline to the Shell-op­er­at­ed on­shore Beach­field gas pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ty.”

Ques­tioned on the size of the in­vest­ment in­volved in de­vel­op­ing the Man­a­tee project, Shell said, “We do not share the costs of spe­cif­ic projects as these de­tails are com­mer­cial­ly con­fi­den­tial.”

The com­pa­ny al­so de­clined to com­ment on the up­dat­ed es­ti­mate of the re­sources in the Man­a­tee field.

In a news re­lease on the is­sue, Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, Stu­art Young, said Shell’s FID is the re­sult of sig­nif­i­cant work by the Gov­ern­ment and its con­stant en­gage­ment with the en­er­gy com­pa­ny and its lead­er­ship at the high­est lev­els in Hol­land, Eng­land and T&T.

“This de­vel­op­ment will be the most sig­nif­i­cant hy­dro­car­bon de­vel­op­ment in Trinidad and To­ba­go for the past cou­ple decades and would not have hap­pened were it not for the vi­sion and lead­er­ship of Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.”

The Man­a­tee field strad­dles the mar­itime bor­der be­tween Trinidad and Venezuela. On the Venezue­lan side of the bor­der, the field is named Lo­ran.

The cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion delinked Man­a­tee field from Lo­ran in 2019, which al­lowed for the de­vel­op­ment of the re­sources on the Trinidad side. The Min­istry of En­er­gy then ne­go­ti­at­ed and ex­e­cut­ed a pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tract with Shell for the de­vel­op­ment of the Man­a­tee field in No­vem­ber 2021.

The En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T al­so wel­comed the news that the FID has been tak­en by Shell for the de­vel­op­ment of the Man­a­tee field.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, it said this is a very sig­nif­i­cant de­vel­op­ment for the coun­try and will help cre­ate sta­bil­i­ty for the coun­try’s gas in­dus­try and, by ex­ten­sion, T&T’s en­er­gy ser­vices com­pa­nies.

“This is a ma­jor de­vel­op­ment, pro­ject­ed to de­liv­er sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of nat­ur­al gas, equiv­a­lent to around 20 per cent of cur­rent na­tion­al gas pro­duc­tion. This project has had a long and com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry, not least be­cause it is part of a field that strad­dles the mar­itime bound­ary with Venezuela,” the cham­ber said.

It added that de­liv­er­ing this project in­volved sig­nif­i­cant, com­plex ne­go­ti­a­tions by the Gov­ern­ment, Shell, the gov­ern­ment of Venezuela and nu­mer­ous oth­er stake­hold­ers.