En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal is hail­ing a ma­jor ac­cel­er­a­tion in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion from BP Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Cypre sub­sea project, de­scrib­ing it as a mile­stone for the coun­try’s en­er­gy sup­ply.

The Cypre de­vel­op­ment, com­pris­ing sev­en wells, had its first gas out­put in March 2025 af­ter Phase 1, which in­clud­ed four wells. Yes­ter­day, the re­main­ing three wells of Phase 2 went on­line, sig­nif­i­cant­ly ahead of sched­ule.

Orig­i­nal­ly slat­ed for 2026, Phase 2 gas pro­duc­tion was ac­cel­er­at­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries (MEEI).

Mooni­lal stressed the strate­gic im­por­tance of Cypre gas to T&T’s econ­o­my, not­ing its lo­ca­tion 78 kilo­me­tres off the south­west coast in the East Ma­yaro block at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 80 me­tres of wa­ter depth. He added, “At peak pro­duc­tion, this would de­liv­er 45,000 bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent per day and more or less 250 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of gas per day which is, more or less, at peak pro­duc­tion, a ten per cent ad­di­tion to our na­tion­al gas out­put.”

The min­is­ter cred­it­ed pol­i­cy in­cen­tives in­tro­duced by the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment in 2014 for lay­ing the ground­work for BP’s in­vest­ment in the Macadamia-1 ex­plo­ration well, drilled in March 2017. The ex­plo­ration al­lowance, which had a sun­set clause ex­pir­ing in De­cem­ber 2017, al­so en­abled the Sa­van­nah ex­plo­ration well, which led to the Mat­a­pal project cur­rent­ly in pro­duc­tion.

“If the ex­plo­ration in­cen­tive was not pro­vid­ed in 2014, these two projects would not have ma­te­ri­alised and our nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion would be much worse than it cur­rent­ly is,” he said.

Mooni­lal al­so dis­missed re­cent crit­i­cisms from for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young, say­ing, “When we speak of es­tab­lish­ing the le­gal frame­work for at­tract­ing and in­cen­tivis­ing in­vest­ment, his claim to fame to this project is that he went to vis­it the pipes.”

In a Face­book post yes­ter­day, Young stressed that while the de­vel­op­ment was a pos­i­tive step for the coun­try, he ar­gued that it was the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) gov­ern­ment that se­cured the agree­ment with bpTT. He added that the project was ne­go­ti­at­ed, and a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion made be­tween 2017 and 2023.

Mean­while, Mooni­lal sought to re­as­sure in­vestors and the pub­lic about off­shore se­cu­ri­ty and op­er­a­tional sta­bil­i­ty.

“Many of them have been in dis­pute or con­flict ar­eas of the world and op­er­ate, and they are not at all dis­turbed by this. They have their con­tin­gency plans and so on. So there’s re­al­ly no high risk. The in­stal­la­tions have se­cu­ri­ty, and we con­tin­ue to work along our law en­force­ment min­is­ters and part­ners so that this is not an is­sue that is be­fore us now,” Mooni­lal said.

He called state­ments from for­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley about pos­si­ble threats to T&T’s off­shore plat­forms should the na­tion be em­broiled in any fight be­tween the US and Venezuela as “ir­re­spon­si­ble” and “mis­chie­vous”, in­sist­ing the Gov­ern­ment was ful­ly ca­pa­ble of man­ag­ing both off­shore and on­shore en­er­gy in­fra­struc­ture.

The min­is­ter con­clud­ed that the ac­cel­er­at­ed Phase 2 wells, com­bined with on­go­ing up­stream projects, will pro­vide a sig­nif­i­cant boost to T&T’s nat­ur­al gas sec­tor while en­sur­ing con­tin­ued rev­enue growth and en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty.