The lo­cal fab­ri­ca­tion phase for the Man­a­tee project was cel­e­brat­ed ear­li­er this week with a cer­e­mo­ni­al sim­u­la­tion of steel cut­ting at the Trinidad Off­shore Fab­ri­ca­tors Un­lim­it­ed (TOF­CO) yard, La Brea in­dus­tri­al es­tate.

A state­ment post­ed by the T&T En­er­gy Cham­ber ex­plained the lo­cal fab­ri­ca­tion of jack­ets and piles (legs and sup­port­ing frame) for the Man­a­tee plat­form will kick-off in De­cem­ber.

The Man­a­tee jack­et is set to be the largest jack­et to be built lo­cal­ly at TOF­CO’s yard.

In de­liv­er­ing the keynote ad­dress at the in­au­gu­ra­tion cer­e­mo­ny, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said, “This has been my third vis­it to the TOF­CO yard in the last month to view fab­ri­ca­tion projects that were a di­rect out­come of Gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy and strat­e­gy com­ing to­geth­er. The Gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue de­liv­er­ing world-class op­por­tu­ni­ties to La Brea, Point Fortin and oth­er com­mu­ni­ties in T&T.”

In 2019, a gov­ern­ment-to-gov­ern­ment agree­ment was made be­tween the Gov­ern­ment of T&T and the Bo­li­var­i­an Re­pub­lic of Venezuela al­low­ing each coun­try to in­de­pen­dent­ly de­vel­op its re­spec­tive share of the Lo­ran-Man­a­tee field.

Man­a­tee is ex­pect­ed to start pro­duc­tion in 2027 and once on­line, Man­a­tee is ex­pect­ed to reach peak pro­duc­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 104,000 bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent per day (boe/d) (604 MM­scf/d).

The pro­ject­ed gas pro­duc­tion will boost T&T’s econ­o­my and earn for­eign ex­change though the util­i­sa­tion of lo­cal ser­vices and hy­dro­car­bon ex­ports.

Com­ment­ing on the lo­cal fab­ri­ca­tion mile­stone event, Adam Low­mass, se­nior vice-pres­i­dent and coun­try chair, Shell, stat­ed, “At Shell, we are proud to part­ner with pro­fes­sion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions like Mc Der­mott and TOF­CO. We are con­fi­dent that the Man­a­tee jack­et will be com­plet­ed on time and with high qual­i­ty of crafts­man­ship and look for­ward to bring­ing this project on­line for Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

Gen­er­al man­ag­er at TOF­CO, Javed Mo­hammed, ac­knowl­edged the work ahead and the pos­i­tive re­la­tion­ship be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the project’s stake­hold­ers stat­ing, “The jour­ney ahead will be filled with chal­lenges, but it is through our col­lab­o­ra­tion and per­se­ver­ance that we will turn these chal­lenges in­to op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth and suc­cess as we set new stan­dards in off­shore con­struc­tion.”