GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

In a trans­for­ma­tion of its lo­cal op­er­a­tions, Wood­side En­er­gy has ef­fec­tive­ly tran­si­tioned from be­ing a ma­jor em­ploy­er in T&T’s en­er­gy sec­tor to a sin­gle-per­son pres­ence on the ground as it dis­closed it has down­sized as a re­sult of its di­vest­ment of en­er­gy as­sets in this coun­try.

The Aus­tralian en­er­gy gi­ant, which once main­tained a work­force of over 100 peo­ple at its peak, has con­sol­i­dat­ed its lo­cal lead­er­ship in­to a lone coun­try man­ag­er as it piv­ots its en­tire re­gion­al strat­e­gy to­ward a deep­wa­ter project, Ca­lyp­so.

The down­siz­ing was re­vealed dur­ing the third meet­ing of the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) on En­er­gy Af­fairs, fol­low­ing an in­quiry in­to the state’s strate­gies to pro­mote in­vest­ments for both off­shore and on­shore ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ties.

It marked the con­clu­sion of a rapid di­vest­ment phase that has re­shaped the coun­try’s en­er­gy land­scape as be­tween March and Ju­ly 2025, Wood­side com­plet­ed the sale of its in­ter­est in the ma­ture Greater An­gos­tu­ra and Ru­by fields to Peren­co.

The re­duc­tion in staff was not a sim­ple mass lay­off, but rather a “port­fo­lio op­ti­mi­sa­tion” that saw most of the com­pa­ny’s 100 plus em­ploy­ees trans­ferred to Peren­co as part of the as­set sale, the com­mit­tee heard.

Wood­side’s vice-pres­i­dent De­vel­op­ments Grant McKen­zie ex­plained the de­ci­sion to sell was in the best in­ter­est of all in­volved but al­so in­di­cat­ed the coun­try was not to­tal­ly fin­ished with T&T.

“The di­vest­ment to Peren­co al­lowed that as­set to po­ten­tial­ly see more life than it would have done un­der Wood­side. So it’s a win win, in our opin­ion. And mov­ing for­ward on Ca­lyp­so, with mat­u­ra­tion of that project, then ob­vi­ous­ly the in-coun­try pres­ence would evolve,” Mcken­zie said.

How­ev­er, con­cerns were ex­pressed by for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young who stat­ed in the dis­cus­sions, “The point I’m mak­ing is that we have gone from sig­nif­i­cant boots on the ground and per­son­nel on the ground down to one per­son, and there has been no pub­lic pro­nounce­ment of that what­so­ev­er, even though we’ve asked on a num­ber of oc­ca­sions of the gov­ern­ment to tell us what was go­ing on.”

Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs and in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, Nicholas Mor­ris sought fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion stat­ing that the down­siz­ing was “not an overnight is­sue.”

In re­sponse, for­mer vice-pres­i­dent and coun­try man­ag­er T&T, Kellyanne Lochan ex­plained, “Re­gard­ing the down­siz­ing process, the as­sets were di­vest­ed to Peren­co as at the 11th of Ju­ly in 2025. At that point in time, the op­er­a­tion staff sup­port­ing the project were al­so trans­ferred across to Per­an­co.

“Wood­side’s op­er­a­tions in Trinidad and To­ba­go, the per­son­nel sup­port­ed both greater An­gos­tu­ra op­er­a­tions as well as some of our glob­al func­tions across the globe, in the Unit­ed States as well as Aus­tralia. And so whilst we have pre­dom­i­nant­ly the big part of our work­force lo­cal­ly sup­port­ing the An­gos­tu­ra as­sets, and they’ve moved across to work for Peren­co, we did have 10 to 15 peo­ple work­ing glob­al­ly with­in Wood­side but they have since mi­grat­ed to ei­ther the Unit­ed States or to Aus­tralia to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing those glob­al func­tions.”

She added the in­vest­ment was an­nounced in March 2025 and the tran­si­tion process was fi­nalised last Ju­ly.

On March 28, 2025, Wood­side En­er­gy said it had en­tered an agree­ment with Peren­co to di­vest its Greater An­gos­tu­ra as­sets for US$206 mil­lion.

The di­vest­ment in­cludes Wood­side’s in­ter­est in the shal­low wa­ter An­gos­tu­ra and Ru­by off­shore oil and gas fields, as­so­ci­at­ed pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties and the on­shore ter­mi­nal.

The deal, com­bines these as­sets with Peren­co’s ex­ist­ing op­er­a­tion of the Teak, Samaan and Poui (TSP) fields and Cashima, Amher­s­tia, Flam­boy­ant and Im­mortelle (CAFI) fields.

The Greater An­gos­tu­ra field pro­duces ap­prox­i­mate­ly 12 per cent of T&T’s gas sup­ply.