JAVED RAZACK
Why should we care if there is any gas after Dragon? Petroleum, particularly gas, is the backbone of our economy. The US-dollar limit on your credit card is tied intrinsically to gas production.
Finding oil or gas fields and getting them online is a lengthy process. Generally, the government has a bid round, putting out blocks for auction.
These rounds may take two years from opening to signing a block to an operator (like a bp or Shell).
Then exploration occurs which means acquiring seismic data followed by drilling wells. This is usually about six years.
A chance of exploration success of 25 per cent is considered very good and in deepwater it may be as low as ten per cent.
Any discoveries may be appraised by further drilling and then commercial evaluation takes place. This will be another few years.
If all goes well, the project reaches FID (final investment decision) and then the engineering to bring that field to life begins. A couple more years goes by.
It may be anything from ten-20 years from a bid round to first gas or oil. For example, the blocks for Woodside’s Calypso project were signed in 2012 and in 2025, FID has not been reached yet.
Many more aspects than we can list here will factor in and can change those timeframes.
Trinidad and Tobago’s gas decline
TT’s gas production averaged 2.5 bcf/day in 2024. This is 42 per cent less than the country’s peak gas production of 4.3 bcf/day, last seen in 2010.
The huge drop is due to a mixture of:
1. Natural decline of fields.
2. Not enough new gas fields were brought online due to:
• Exploration slowed because of a seven-year gap in blocks being awarded (2010 to 2015: 21 blocks, 2015 to 2022: 0 and 2023 to present: 13 blocks).
• Exploration also slowed due to a lack of fiscal incentives.
For example, from 2014 to 2017 there was a capital allowance for 100 per cent of exploration costs to be written off in that year vs over five years.
After 2017, this was not continued nor was any new incentive given to encourage exploration.
• Exploration failures such as Shell’s Aphrodite and Ice wells in 2022 which would have hoped to find new gas fields that could be brought online quickly.
3. Underperforming fields. For example, Shell’s Starfish and Dolphin fields as well as Woodside’s Ruby did not produce gas at the rates expected or for the durations expected.
[caption id="attachment_1151201" align="alignnone" width="1024"] An offshore platform. Source: cloudnet.com -[/caption]
4. The fact that most of the large gas fields in our shallow water have already been found. While there is certainly exploration potential, we are a pretty mature gas province. Most of the big easy gas has simply been exploited.
There are, however, a few cross-border and near-border Venezuelan gas fields that could greatly alleviate our gas pains, without any major technical challenges – namely, Dragon, Manakin-Cocuina and Loran.
There are also a host of domestic gas projects in the pipeline, but these will generally make up for the n
