BHP makes big gas discovery

The Aus­tralian en­er­gy com­pa­ny, BHP has made a 3.5 tril­lion cu­bic feet dis­cov­ery in the north­ern deep­wa­ter area of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

This an­nounce­ment was made at an in­vestor up­date on 11 No­vem­ber by BHP Pres­i­dent Op­er­a­tions Pe­tro­le­um, Geral­dine Slat­tery.

Slat­tery said: “In the deep­wa­ter, in our North­ern li­cens­es, we have de­clared 3.5tcf gross dis­cov­ery, with fur­ther po­ten­tial up­side. Whilst de­tailed de­vel­op­ment stud­ies are just get­ting start­ed, a hub ap­pears best suit­ed to this play.”

The North­ern li­cense area in­cludes the Tuk-1, Bele-1, Boom-1, Hi-Hat-1 and Bon­gos-2 wells.

This is good news for the coun­try which has suf­fered from nat­ur­al gas short­ages.

Slater­ry added that BHP has op­er­at­ed in T&T for near­ly 20 years in the shal­low-wa­ter An­gos­tu­ra field. She not­ed: “Ear­li­er this year we sanc­tioned the Ru­by Brown­field project, which was un­der­pinned by con­tin­ued ap­praisal and seis­mic imag­ing in prox­im­i­ty to the orig­i­nal de­vel­op­ment.”

In T&T, Slat­tery not­ed that the con­text “as­sumes ac­cess to ex­ist­ing LNG in­fra­struc­ture in T&T, which has ca­pac­i­ty, whilst rec­og­niz­ing, there are mul­ti­ple de­vel­op­ment con­cepts be­ing con­sid­ered at this phase in the project.”

She said that as the op­er­a­tor, with high eq­ui­ty in­ter­est, BHP al­so has the scope to op­ti­mize the de­vel­op­ment plan­ning and the de­vel­op­ment con­cept. Slat­tery stat­ed: “Sub­ject to be­ing com­pet­i­tive for cap­i­tal, we see an FID (Fi­nal In­vest­ment De­ci­sion) from 2022.”

Dur­ing the Q&A seg­ment, Gold­man Sachs em­ploy­ee, Paul Young ques­tioned Slat­tery as to whether spare ca­pac­i­ty will open at At­lantic LNG. He al­so asked if bhp has enough re­sources to move ahead with its plan or if the com­pa­ny’s plans are con­tin­gent on fur­ther ex­plo­ration.