Venezuela’s gas reserves offer new opportunities for T&T

Pe­ter Christo­pher

Se­nior Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­[email protected]

With Venezuela’s vast gas re­serves and T&T’s un­der­used en­er­gy in­fra­struc­ture cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful re­gion­al op­por­tu­ni­ty, cross-bor­der en­er­gy co­op­er­a­tion was a top­ic of dis­cus­sion at yes­ter­day’s En­er­gy Con­fer­ence.

Mala Bali­raj, chair of the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T, ac­knowl­edged the po­ten­tial op­por­tu­ni­ties in her speech.

“There are two projects list­ed on this map where the ma­jor fac­tor de­lay­ing ex­e­cu­tion is be­yond Trinidad and To­ba­go’s di­rect con­trol, name­ly the Shell/NGC in­vest­ment in the Drag­on field in Venezuela and the bp/NGC in­vest­ment in the Man­akin/Cocuina cross-bor­der field. Re­cent changes in Venezuela might of­fer new hope that these two projects can move to­ward im­ple­men­ta­tion,” Bali­raj said.

“These two projects al­so need to be seen in a wider con­text. Venezuela holds mas­sive gas re­serves, some­where in the re­gion of 200 tril­lion cu­bic feet. Many of these are in non-as­so­ci­at­ed gas fields in the east of the coun­try, in­clud­ing off­shore in both the Patao, Mejil­lones, Río Caribe, and Dragón com­plex to the north­west of Trinidad and the Platafor­ma Deltana area, off Trinidad’s south­east coast.”

She said giv­en the prox­im­i­ty of these re­sources to ex­ist­ing Trinidad gas in­fra­struc­ture, it made “ex­cel­lent sense for both Trinidad and Venezuela to use Trinida­di­an in­fra­struc­ture.”

bpTT pres­i­dent David Camp­bell agreed that this is an op­ti­mal sce­nario.

“We are talk­ing a lot about Venezuela, but cross-bor­der gen­er­al­ly the in­dus­tri­al log­ic says, dis­cov­er un­de­vel­oped re­sources in a place where per­haps peo­ple are less con­fi­dent to in­vest right next to our un­der­used re­sources,” Camp­bell said.

“At­lantic, Point Lisas and so on. There’s an ob­vi­ous log­ic that can be made to work. So yes, I see the po­ten­tial for growth in both those ar­eas. We al­so, of course, are al­ways in­ter­est­ed in ex­plo­ration more wide­ly in oth­er coun­tries. Our kit is al­ready ful­ly de­pre­ci­at­ed and avail­able; that is very com­pet­i­tive in com­par­i­son to build­ing a new plant near­by.”

Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration’s Paul Baay al­so said he was op­ti­mistic about the op­por­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed by Venezuela but ad­mit­ted there were some lo­gis­ti­cal points to be ironed out.

“I am op­ti­mistic about it. I mean, for us small­er pro­duc­ers that can maybe take a lit­tle more risk, I think it’s a pret­ty in­ter­est­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty. The trick is go­ing to be tim­ing, how you take ad­van­tage of that? We’re still try­ing to fig­ure that out a lit­tle bit,” said Baay.

Day two of the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence will take place to­day at the Hy­att Re­gency.