Jun 2017 Financial News

bpTT confirms gas find

Jun 02, 2017

BPTT Regional President Norman Christie says the recent discovery of two trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas means TT is “past the worst right now”, in terms of supply shortages. However, he cautioned that “we have to keep these discoveries going so we can be ‘past the worst’, for a longer period.” Christie spoke yesterday following a bpTT press conference at the Hilton Trinidad in Port-of-Spain.

Confirmation of the significant gas discoveries in the Savannah and Macadamia exploration wells off Trinidad’s south-east coast, was one of five announcements by Chief Executive of Upstream at BP, Bernard Looney .

“Today is about celebrating recent successes: The completion of gas contract negotiations with the National Gas Company (NGC); The long-awaited sanction of the Angelin project by BP largely supported by the successful negotiations; The safe start-up of two projects — Sercan II with our partner EOG (EOG Resources) and the Trinidad Offshore Compression project (TROC); “The imminent start-up of the Juniper project and...we have found gas in commercial quantities in our two exploration wells — Savannah and Macadamia,” Looney said. Asked how soon gas from these two wells would come on stream, Christie said production is expected to start in the 2020 to 2021, time frame .

“The gas from these discoveries would go to both Atlantic and the domestic market. So this is a benefit to both sides of the equation in terms of where our supplies go,” Christie said. Regarding bpTT’s plans to increase gas production prior to 2020, Christie reiterated Looney’s earlier announcements adding the company has an offshore compression project which would start in the 2020 time period .

“So what you should hear from (this) is a plan to get production to a healthy level and sustain that production level for the medium to long-term.” Energy Minister Franklin Khan, asked if the find meant an end to TT’s gas shortage, said: “I don’t want to be so predictive but BP has shared some good news today .

Shell hasn’t come public with their plans as BP has, but Shell has some good news to share and I hope they will share it shortly with the population .

“As I said earlier, EOG is the unsung hero in the Trinidad gas market. They have been quietly doing small developments and they’re contributing a fair amount of gas. More importantly, all of EOG’s gas goes to NGC...So between those three companies, I would want to say that by early 2019, if we haven’t made the gas curtailment issue disappear, we’ll be fairly close to that,” Khan said . 

Source:
Sasha Harrinanan
Newsday
Friday June 2, 2017

http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/0,244475.html