(Trinidad Express) Trinidad and Tobago has just over nine years of natural gas left, a new Ryder Scott Company audit report showed yesterday.
Officials of the US-based oil and gas audit company said in their report that Trinidad’s gas reserves have continued to fall over the past few years.
One of the major problems for the energy sector, which contributes the majority of the country’s foreign currency earnings, is that new gas is not being found quickly enough to replace the gas that is being used for energy.
Larry McHalffey, senior petroleum engineer at the audit company, said gas reserves reached a new and “critical” low in the past 12 months.
McHalffey was joined by Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine at the Hyatt Regency (Trinidad) Hotel in Port of Spain yesterday to report on the country’s recent Gas Reserves Certifications as at the end of 2010.
Though Ramnarine was confident that “gas was not running out”, McHalffey painted a dimmer picture of the future of the gas industry.
The gas audit figures have been steadily decreasing from 12 years two years ago, to ten years last year. Even then McHalffney described the situation as “bleak”.
This latest report has indicated that at the end of last year, unrisked proven gas reserves dropped from 14,416 to 13,460 billion cubic feet (BCF) while probable finds dwindled from 7,837 in 2009 to 7,642 last year.
The exploration capacity also dropped from 25,990 to 25,978 BCF.
McHalffey said even with more aggressive exploration and production (E&P) to increase the diminishing reserves, the drop in the global demand for fuel added another dimension of challenges to the oil and gas sector.
“In order to bring the exploration resources into the production category requires expenditure of current capital and the operators don’t have a market for the current gas that they have so they are market constrained and they don’t want to over develop for something that they wouldn’t need for another two or three years,” McHalffey said.
McHalffney said instead of an optimum 100 per cent replacement of gas back into the reserves, for 2010 the replacement figure dropped to a low 35 per cent.
Ramnarine explained that low figure was a direct result of the reduction in E&P in 2010.
Ramnarine said he was not worried about the dip in reserve levels since the recent award of two blocks to BP could also potentially lead to the discovery of new reserves.
He said those two blocks were estimated to have “unrisked natural gas resources” between 4.7 – 8.2 trillion cubic feet (TCF) based on the Ministry’s “conservative estimates”.
“At the present time, even if there is a major gas discovery in this country there simply is no or little market for that gas,” he said, adding that all the demand for natural gas was already occupied.
“Put quite simply we cannot expect that companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to explore, appraise and develop reserves and have no market for that natural gas,” he said.
“We need to take our energy skills and expertise outside of the country. In that regard, we are very advanced in discussions with Ghana and there is the possibility of an NGC (National Gas Company) investment in Ghana very soon. We also have a possible investment and discussions with Government of Tanzania, so we focusing a lot on getting the NGC out of Trinidad an Tobago,” Ramnarine said.
