As T&T tries to get sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est from oil and gas com­pa­nies in its deep­wa­ter blocks comes a warn­ing from En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young that things are not as they used to be, with ma­jor com­pa­nies not seek­ing to in­vest and ex­plore in new ter­ri­to­ries.

Speak­ing on Tues­day at a news con­fer­ence to of­fi­cial­ly launch the bid round in T&T, Young was asked if there was any in­ter­est in this coun­try’s acreage from com­pa­nies like Exxon or To­tal, that were not now op­er­a­tors in T&T.

In a long-wind­ed and of­ten cir­cum­luc­u­tive an­swer, the min­is­ter ap­peared to be say­ing there is in­ter­est but that is lim­it­ed by the new de­mands of share­hold­ers.

He said, “Sev­en­teen com­pa­nies have ex­pressed an in­ter­est. If you do a quick sub­trac­tion 17 mi­nus bpTT, Shell, EOG, and the oth­er play­ers, BHP in T&T, you are ob­vi­ous­ly left with oth­er in­ter­ests apart from those that are al­ready here in T&T. That’s the first point.

“So we don’t ex­pect it to be lim­it­ed. I have had con­ver­sa­tions as I have said, as you would, with the ma­jor play­ers here, be­cause as you should know right now, the glob­al mar­ket is chang­ing.”

He then goes on to say, “The quest for cap­i­tal of all the ma­jor oil and gas com­pa­nies has changed. You may have seen in in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy news that most of these en­ti­ties, the share­hold­ers have said do not go and in­vest in new provinces.

“So in provinces where Shell isn’t al­ready es­tab­lished, share­hold­ers may say do not go there, any­where else out­side of the al­ready ex­ist­ing as­set base and in­vest, and this is hap­pen­ing with all of the ma­jor play­ers. The Exxons, the Chevrons, the To­tal etc.”

Young said when he was re­cent­ly in Hous­ton and “the CEOs of these ma­jor com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Sau­di Ram­co (Sau­di Aram­co) etc, this is some­thing they are all aware of.”

He ex­plained, “So a lot of the oil and gas ma­jors are not be­ing per­mit­ted by their share­hold­ers or there is that push back not to go in­to new ar­eas to in­vest. So the first thing we will do in T&T, ob­vi­ous­ly peo­ple have put down bil­lions of dol­lars over decades of in­vest­ment here in T&T.

They have the as­sets and we all know that bpTT and Shell are the ma­jor share­hold­ers in At­lantic, that is where the in­vest­ment is go­ing to be. So these are the peo­ple we reached out to and spoke to ini­tial­ly, there is in­ter­est, as I said, 17 com­pa­nies that we’re look­ing at and nom­i­nat­ing blocks, so hope­ful­ly there is more in­ter­est but we have to wait and see.

“I don’t think any­thing is closed but I will say at this stage it is not like how it used to be many decades ago, when you ex­pect all of the oil and gas ma­jors to be rush­ing in­to var­i­ous provinces, be­cause that gap for capex is nar­row­ing.”

“Dur­ing the time the bid round is open there, will be in­ter­na­tion­al pro­mo­tions and road shows, show­cas­ing T&T’s deep­wa­ter acreage.”

The min­is­ter of en­er­gy told the news con­fer­ence as he as­sured all will be done to en­cour­age in­vestors to take a look at T&T.

In his pre­pared re­marks, Young said 12 in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies had ac­cessed the Min­istry of En­er­gy’s da­ta room to look at what was on of­fer.

T&T’s deep­wa­ter bid round is the first of the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion and fol­lows a failed near shore bid round. It al­so comes years af­ter in­dus­try ex­perts warned the Gov­ern­ment that its con­tin­ued de­lays in go­ing to the mar­ket, would have neg­a­tive con­se­quences for the in­dus­try.

With no ma­jor oil dis­cov­ery in the deep­wa­ter, the Min­istry of En­er­gy has tout­ed what it says is 6.5 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas dis­cov­ered by BHP in its 11 wells so far, with eight of the 11 en­coun­ter­ing hy­dro­car­bons.

Young was asked if the re­cent suc­cess­ful Bon­gos 3 and the Bon­gos 4 wells told the coun­try any­thing new about whether the gas in the North­ern area, is bio­genic or ther­mo­genic.

He said, “They con­tin­ue to do ap­praisal wells. Yes right now we are look­ing for hy­dro­car­bons, we are look­ing for the gas out in the deep wa­ter, but we are wait­ing for the fi­nal­i­sa­tion of the Bon­gos 3 and Bon­gos 4 well ap­praisals that are tak­ing place and we will wait for BHP to tell us what they have found. I can say at this stage, there con­tin­ues to be an ex­plo­ration for gas and a look for gas.”

Young said there is a need for T&T to con­tin­ue to en­cour­age ex­plo­ration and de­vel­op­men­tal drilling, so that more re­sources can be moved to the proved re­serves.

“It is with this re­al­i­sa­tion, we have sched­uled a num­ber of bid rounds over the next 12 months, start­ing with our deep­wa­ter bid round which was launched in Hous­ton, on De­cem­ber 5 and is be­ing launched to­day in T&T,” Young told the news con­fer­ence.

The bid round will be opened for six months, with the dead­line for sub­mis­sions be­ing June 2, 2022, with suc­cess­ful bid­ders be­ing an­nounced three months lat­er.

The blocks are be­ing of­fered by Pro­duc­tion Shar­ing Con­tracts, (PSC) and in­cludes blocks 23(b), 24, 25(a) 25(b), 26, 27, TTDAA(1), TTDAA(2), TTDAA(4), (TTDAA(9), TTDAA(11) TTDAA(15) TTDAA(25), TTDAA(26), TTDAA(28) and TTDAA(29) are lo­cat­ed in the deep­wa­ter, off the North­ern and East­ern coasts of T&T.

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Young said, “The to­tal un­risked re­source es­ti­mates of these blocks is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 18.1 (Tcf) of gas.

The blocks were se­lect­ed based on tech­ni­cal eval­u­a­tion of their prospec­tiv­i­ty by an in­ter­nal eval­u­a­tion team, nom­i­na­tions by stake­hold­ers and prox­im­i­ty to the suc­cess­ful BHP deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration cam­paign.”

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter al­so as­sured com­pa­nies that there was sig­nif­i­cant da­ta, in­clud­ing well da­ta avail­able to help de-risk the blocks on of­fer.

Young said the next chap­ter of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s En­er­gy Sec­tor will be de­ter­mined by the suc­cess of the up­com­ing Deep­wa­ter Bid Round.

“What does it mean in lay­man’s terms, it means we have launched a deep­wa­ter bid round that is the fu­ture of nat­ur­al gas ex­plo­ration in Trinidad and To­ba­go and we are hop­ing that this is go­ing to be suc­cess­ful, we have re­vised, we have lis­tened to the stake­hold­ers, we have re­vised the terms that are on of­fer,” he said.

“We have come and we have told the coun­try as you would ex­pect these are de­plet­ing re­sources these are re­sources that would be re­duced as you ex­plore and you pro­duce the re­sources they would be de­plet­ing, for­tu­nate­ly we keep mov­ing up from what we be­lieve ex­ists in­to the realm of ready to be pro­duced,” he said.

With T&T’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion falling in Au­gust to 2.344 bil­lion cu­bic feet per day there is as­sur­ance that the fall in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion in T&T s not as a re­sult of the qual­i­ty of the basin but was a di­rect im­pact of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

That is the con­clu­sion of Ry­der Scott and its Ex­ec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent Her­man Acu­na.

Ac­cord­ing to Acu­na T&T’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion fell from a high in the 2010/2011 pe­ri­od of over 1.4 tril­lion cu­bic feet per an­num to just over 1tcf in 2020.

The de­cline in gas pro­duc­tion has caused both eco­nom­ic pain for T&T and con­tributed to some of the plants at the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate shut­ting down.

“We can see for 2018 and 2019 the av­er­age pro­duc­tion was 1.2, 1.3tcf per year but due to Covid in 2020, and as ex­pect­ed, the pro­duc­tion went down to about 1.1 tcf for gas.

“Our eval­u­a­tion in­di­cate that this does not have any­thing to do with the de­ple­tion of the as­set but rather the cir­cum­stances of the com­mer­cial sit­u­a­tion due to the Covid emer­gency.” Acu­na told a news con­fer­ence held to present Ry­der Scott’s re­sults of T&T’s nat­ur­al gas re­serves.

The study found that in 2020 T&T’s proven re­serves, now called its P1+C1 was 10.224 tcf of nat­ur­al gas, slight­ly down from the 2019 fig­ure of 10.687 but in keep­ing with the fig­ure for the last five years. Its com­bined proven and prob­a­ble re­serves which com­pa­nies use for their plan­ning sce­nario was a more im­pres­sive 17.3 tcf of gas.

Acu­na al­so not­ed that this coun­try has al­ready ex­tract­ed a mas­sive 28 tril­lion cu­bic feet of gas from the ground, demon­strat­ing the size and depth of the T&T basin.