Consultant Business Editor
anthony.wilson@guardian.co.tt
After close to four years leading the transformation of Heritage Petroleum Company Ltd (HPCL), the company’s CEO Arlene Chow will retire, when her successor is in place.
Asked in a Sunday Guardian interview this month how much longer she is going to be at Heritage, Chow said, “I told my Board that I would like to retire and I said I would hold on until they find a suitable replacement.”
Chow, who has spent 41 years working in the energy industry, leaves Heritage in a good place.
In its 2022 financial year, Heritage paid the Government $4.5 billion in royalties, levies, and taxes, which was an increase from the $2 billion it generated in 2021.
Last Sunday, Heritage reported an after-tax profit of $1.11 billion for the financial year ended September 30, 2022. That was an increase of 63 per cent compared to the profit the company declared for the 2021 financial year.
Under her stewardship, the oil company has put in place a “robust” forward-drilling programme up to 2025, which envisages 18 wells offshore wells and 20 wells on land.
“The forward-drilling programme is the basis of any oil company. Oil companies increase their production by drilling,” she said, adding that Heritage plans to drill five wells this year.
Chow, as well, led the reorganisation of Heritage from a company structured around its assets to one more based on its functions.
“An asset organisation, for example, would have employees who are focused on land, which means there would be health and safety employees or IT professionals for that division,” she said.
“In a functional organisation, all the engineers, geologists, and other professionals would be grouped together under one lead, and their expertise would be shared across the company.”
Early in her tenure as the Heritage CEO, she decided to slow down drilling, while the company reprocessed seismic results for both sea and land, some of which dated back to 1990.
That process of taking another look at previous seismic studies has resulted in Heritage’s land fields at Barrackpore being deemed “a bright spot.”
She said, “We reprocessed in Barrackpore and we are seeing it so much more clearly now. It looks hopeful that there could be prospectivity in the Penal/Barrackpore area. And our next phase of drilling, next year, is going to be partly in that area.”
She also led the management team at Heritage through the trauma of April 2020, when global oil prices plunged into negative territory, for the first time ever, as oil producers and traders decided to offload crude oil into a market that was then oversupplied as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I would not say that was me. That was the whole, strong local leadership team working in tandem to resolve an immediate issue, which resulted in Heritage taking the decision to store crude rather than sell the oil in the weak market,” Chow added.
On the issue of the integrity of the assets of Heritage, she pointed out that 13,000 wells have been drilled on land in Trinidad. Of that number, she estimated that 3,500 wells are active. She said previous state oil companies did not do much integrity management “so we cannot even approach those wells or get a rig on them until we fix the platforms. And you know the saying in the sector is that if you do not maintain one year, you take five years to catch back up. So we are catching back up and it has to take a while.”
Chow said between 2018 and 2022, Heritage-produced crude production–as opposed to the farm out/lease out operations–increased by 17 per cent. The lease and farm-out operators increased production by five per cent. That means, overall, output is up by 11 per cent.
Chow did her first degree in geology and chemistry at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies and a Masters in Engineering at the University of Florida.
The energy veteran, who started her career as a geologist at the state oil company in 1982, is the first female CEO of a national oil company in T&T.
For Chow, this will be her second retirement. Before Heritage, she worked as the chief operating officer of Atlantic LNG, the Point Fortin-based natural gas liquefaction company, on secondment from BP.
She was at Atlantic from January 2013 to June 2018 and retired from BP in December 2018. Chow responded to the call of national service when she joined the wholly state-owned Heritage Petroleum as its interim CEO in September 2019. That followed the departure of the first Heritage CEO, Mike Wylie, who returned to his home in the US to seek cancer treatment.
She spent over 20 years at energy major BP in both local and international assignments. She was the chief of staff of the Executive Office in the Production Division of BP PLC at their head office in London between 2012 and 2014.
She has also held top positions at BP Alaska and at bpTT, she was the VP corporate operations.