GEISHA KOW­LESSAR ALON­ZO

PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Just about a week af­ter Shell con­firmed it had tak­en a Fi­nal In­vest­ment De­ci­sion (FID) on the Aphrodite project, Sub­sea7 has an­nounced that the com­pa­ny has been award­ed a size­able con­tract by Shell for the un­de­vel­oped nat­ur­al gas field in the East Coast Ma­rine Area (EC­MA) in T&T.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from Sub­sea7, the con­tract is re­lat­ed to the trans­porta­tion and in­stal­la­tion of sub­sea equip­ment at the Aphrodite de­vel­op­ment, lo­cat­ed with­in Block 5a, at wa­ter depths of up to 290 me­tres.

The re­lease ex­plained that project man­age­ment and en­gi­neer­ing ac­tiv­i­ties will be­gin im­me­di­ate­ly at Sub­sea7’s of­fice in Hous­ton, Texas, with off­shore op­er­a­tions planned for 2027.

Craig Brous­sard, se­nior vice pres­i­dent for Sub­sea7 Gulf of Mex­i­co, said, “En­gag­ing with Shell from the out­set has been key to build­ing trust and dri­ving ef­fi­cien­cies. This award in T&T re­flects our grow­ing pres­ence in the re­gion, as well as our on­go­ing com­mit­ment to safe, pre­dictable project de­liv­ery while sup­port­ing lo­cal tal­ent and re­sources.”

Ac­cord­ing to the re­lease, the con­tract in a range be­tween US$50 mil­lion and US$150 mil­lion. Last week Shell T&T Ltd (Shell) an­nounced it had tak­en up the FID on Aphrodite, stat­ing the project “will al­low Shell to in­cre­men­tal­ly ex­pand its in­te­grat­ed gas busi­ness by build­ing on ex­ist­ing de­vel­op­ments in the EC­MA, one of the coun­try’s most pro­lif­ic gas-pro­duc­ing ar­eas.”

Shell point­ed out that the EC­MA of T&T is cur­rent­ly home to Shell’s largest gas-pro­duc­ing fields in the coun­try in­clud­ing Dol­phin, Starfish, Boun­ty and En­deav­our. Shell said the gas field will serve as a back­fill for the coun­try’s At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ty. The com­pa­ny added that in­creased pro­duc­tion from the field will help to max­i­mize the po­ten­tial util­i­sa­tion of Shell’s ex­ist­ing as­sets.

Adam Low­mass, coun­try chair of Shell T&T said, “By in­creas­ing the gas sup­ply to At­lantic LNG, the project will not on­ly serve to for­ti­fy the do­mes­tic gas mar­ket, it will al­so boost the lo­cal petro­chem­i­cal and pow­er-gen­er­a­tion in­dus­tries.”