Chi­na Na­tion­al Off­shore Oil Cor­po­ra­tion (CNOOC), one of the world’s largest off­shore oil and gas pro­duc­ers, is poised to deep­en its pres­ence in T&T af­ter the Cab­i­net ap­proved the award of pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tracts for two off­shore blocks.

Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Dr Roodal Mooni­lal dis­closed yes­ter­day that Cab­i­net ac­cept­ed a rec­om­men­da­tion from the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries to move for­ward with award­ing Blocks 24 and 25 to the Chi­nese state-owned en­er­gy gi­ant fol­low­ing a com­pet­i­tive bid round con­duct­ed last year.

Mooni­lal de­scribed CNOOC as the third-largest na­tion­al oil com­pa­ny in Chi­na and the coun­try’s largest off­shore pro­duc­er of oil and gas.

He ex­plained that the com­pa­ny had ex­pressed a strong in­ter­est in the blocks dur­ing the bid­ding process.

Cab­i­net’s ap­proval means the Gov­ern­ment will now move in­to the next phase of ne­go­ti­a­tions with the com­pa­ny be­fore fi­nal­is­ing the pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tracts.

Mooni­lal in­di­cat­ed that the off­shore acreage lies rough­ly 45 to 50 miles off Trinidad’s north coast.
“We had a very strong in­ter­est by a com­pa­ny, a very im­por­tant com­pa­ny, Chi­na Na­tion­al Off­shore Oil Cor­po­ra­tion,” Mooni­lal stat­ed dur­ing yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing.

The de­vel­op­ment rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant ad­di­tion to the coun­try’s up­stream in­vest­ment pipeline at a time when T&T is at­tempt­ing to re­verse a decade of de­clin­ing nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion.

Mooni­lal al­so con­firmed progress on a key cross-bor­der gas ini­tia­tive in­volv­ing Shell and the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. He re­port­ed that Shell signed a frame­work agree­ment with Venezuela, which es­tab­lish­es the struc­ture for ad­vanc­ing the Drag­on gas project. The agree­ment is ex­pect­ed to pro­vide the com­pa­ny with the reg­u­la­to­ry and com­mer­cial cer­tain­ty need­ed to pro­ceed with de­vel­op­ment.

Mooni­lal ex­plained that the Gov­ern­ment now has a clear­er time­line for the project, with first gas ex­pect­ed be­tween the sec­ond and third quar­ters of 2027, if cur­rent sched­ules re­main on track.

He not­ed that Drag­on forms part of a broad­er set of cross-bor­der en­er­gy projects be­ing pur­sued to se­cure ad­di­tion­al gas sup­ply. These in­clude the Cocuina-Man­akin and Lo­ran-Man­a­tee fields.

How­ev­er, the min­is­ter em­pha­sised that T&T’s strat­e­gy is not sole­ly de­pen­dent on cross-bor­der gas de­vel­op­ment.

“But the coast is clear for the full ex­plo­ration of pro­duc­tion at the Lo­ran-Man­a­tee field, at Cocuina-Man­akin and at Drag­on,” Mooni­lal stat­ed.
“But I want to make the point for the cit­i­zens to un­der­stand that we are not de­pend­ing on cross-bor­der gas alone. We have what could be about 11 oth­er projects that we are work­ing on, al­most on a dai­ly ba­sis.”

Mooni­lal al­so ad­dressed the po­ten­tial fi­nan­cial im­pact of ris­ing glob­al oil prices linked to geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions in the Mid­dle East, par­tic­u­lar­ly in­volv­ing Iran.

While high­er crude prices could gen­er­ate ad­di­tion­al rev­enue for the coun­try, he cau­tioned that the fi­nan­cial ben­e­fits would like­ly be mod­est.

Based on cur­rent es­ti­mates, Mooni­lal ex­plained that an in­crease in Brent crude prices from ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$72 per bar­rel to around US$85 could yield about US$10 mil­lion in ad­di­tion­al month­ly rev­enue.

How­ev­er, he warned that high­er glob­al prices al­so dri­ve up the Gov­ern­ment’s fu­el im­port bill. With the clo­sure of the Petrotrin re­fin­ery in 2018, T&T now im­ports re­fined pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts, in­clud­ing gaso­line and diesel. This in­creas­es the cost of main­tain­ing the coun­try’s fu­el sub­sidy pro­gramme when in­ter­na­tion­al prices rise.

“Don’t for­get that the gov­ern­ment sub­sidy is es­sen­tial­ly tak­ing mon­ey from the tax­pay­er,” Mooni­lal ex­plained.

“So that will off­set each oth­er, so that we are not, at this stage, thrilling our­selves that it will be any great rev­enue in­crease be­cause we have to pay more.”

He added that if the re­fin­ery were still op­er­at­ing and pro­duc­ing re­fined prod­ucts lo­cal­ly, the coun­try would like­ly be in a stronger po­si­tion to ben­e­fit from high­er oil prices.

De­spite those con­straints, Mooni­lal re­port­ed that the en­er­gy sec­tor’s over­all con­tri­bu­tion to the na­tion­al trea­sury in­creased be­tween 2024 and 2025.

Ac­cord­ing to fig­ures pro­vid­ed dur­ing the brief­ing, en­er­gy rev­enues rose from ap­prox­i­mate­ly $7.8 bil­lion in 2024 to $8.2 bil­lion in 2025.

The in­crease of rough­ly $390 mil­lion re­flects re­ceipts from li­cence fees, roy­al­ties and leas­es as well as pay­ments tied to pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tracts.

Mooni­lal in­di­cat­ed that the Gov­ern­ment ex­pects the sec­tor’s con­tri­bu­tion to con­tin­ue trend­ing up­ward in 2026 as pro­duc­tion lev­els im­prove and new projects move clos­er to de­vel­op­ment. An­drea Perez-Sobers