PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Chair­man of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny Ger­ald Ramdeen yes­ter­day said ne­go­ti­a­tions with Shell are on­go­ing amid in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports that sug­gest Shell’s Aphrodite nat­ur­al gas project in Trinidad and To­ba­go is in doubt.

Ac­cord­ing to a Reuters re­port, which was shared on sev­er­al in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy web­sites, Shell shelved the off­shore Aphrodite nat­ur­al gas project in Trinidad and To­ba­go as of Au­gust 2026.

The re­ports stat­ed the de­ci­sion was re­lat­ed to the fail­ure to come to a com­mer­cial terms agree­ment with the NGC.

When con­tact­ed on Mon­day evening, Ramdeen said he was un­aware of the in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports. He stat­ed the NGC had on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions with Shell con­cern­ing Aphrodite and oth­er projects, but he could not di­vulge any­thing fur­ther due to non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments re­lat­ed to those talks.

Shell had an­nounced a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion on the project in June 2025.

As part of its de­ci­sion, Shell has re­leased a jack-up rig it had con­tract­ed to drill the pro­duc­tion wells for the project, ac­cord­ing to the Reuters re­port.

“Shell is in on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions and con­firms that the ini­tial rig slot for Aphrodite ​has been re­leased,” Shell told Reuters.

The com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to eval­u­ate the over­all in­te­grat­ed project sched­ule, it added.

The Aphrodite field, dis­cov­ered in 2022, is lo­cat­ed in the East Coast Ma­rine Area (EC­MA), Block 5a, off­shore Trinidad and To­ba­go. Shell had tar­get­ed pro­duc­tion for 2027.

It was a project that was seen as po­ten­tial op­tion to back­fill the At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ty, strength­en T&T’s do­mes­tic gas mar­ket and sup­ply lo­cal petro­chem­i­cal and pow­er-gen­er­a­tion sec­tors.

Shell ex­pect­ed the project to have an es­ti­mat­ed peak pro­duc­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 mil­lion cu­bic feet per day of nat­ur­al gas.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal was al­so con­tact­ed for a com­ment on the sta­tus of the project, but did not send a re­sponse up to press time on Mon­day.