Touchstone projects high gas yield from Cascadura field

By 2023, the Touchstone Exploration (Trinidad) Ltd Cascadura Field project is expected to produce up to 200 million standard cubic feet per day (mmscf/d) of natural gas with the aid of its new separators.

On Friday, the company revealed the equipment, which was housed at its Forest Reserve Road, Fyzabad office. The large CAS-1 ST1 and CAS DEEP-1 horizontal separators and the vertical flash separator were shipped from Stettler Alberta, Canada, while the vapour recovery units were shipped from Midland Texas, USA.

Touchstone said, when Cascadura starts production, it was expected to start at 60 mmscf/d and then ramped up to 90 mmscf/d by end of 2022 from the two existing wells.

Exploration manager Xavier Moonan said, “The Cascadura field, from getting all that data from these two wells, we were able to establish that there's potentially 700 billion cubic feet in place. That's impressive in onshore gas fields. That makes it actually the largest onshore gas field ever discovered in Trinidad.

“Natural gas will go to Point Lisas but there are also liquids (condensate) which will go via a pipeline, that we will construct southward and that's where we will be able to add oil production to the country as well.”

To assist with the current natural gas supply, Moonan said the National Gas Company (NGC) will be building a 20-inch 1.6km long gas pipeline which would tie the Cascadura facility to their 30-inch Beachfield-Phoenix Park gas pipeline to supply gas to downstream users at Point Lisas.

General manager of operations Christopher George said Touchstone was awaiting relevant approvals, such as its certificate of environmental clearance (CEC) and environmental impact assessment (EIA) from the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) before the separators were installed.

“Initially the determination time would have been June 30. However, we would have had review assessment reports that the EMA will get back to us with if there are any additional questions or things that needed to be addressed. We would have had to have those that came from the EMA and as a result of that the termination period from the end would have been shifted.

“We are hoping to have a very quick turnaround in terms of having that approved. We're just preparing our final review assessment report to be sent back to the EMA and then they will have their review done. Only then will we be able to know what the determination regarding the EIA is.”

George added that the magnitude of the production from the Cascadura facility, once maintained, can be enough to run one of Atlantic’s LNG plants, thereby tremendously benefiting TT.

The equipment was brought in by Ramps Logistics and its vice president of shared services Javed Razack said with the challenges in freight and shipping, the cost of bringing in the equipment was hefty.

“In the current global supply chain environment, we understand that moving things around is quite difficult, it has been like that since covid19, and it continues to be quite difficult given the war in Ukraine.

“The cost factor for the logistics alone would be in the vicinity of US$250,000. Freight has exponentially increased its cost in the last couple of years. Unfortunately, the logistics costs have increased project costs by quite a lot. We've done our best to try to keep it down and work with our partners to minimise costs on this project.”

Touchstone said the separators were a major milestone towards establishing the Cascadura facility which was TT’s first onshore liquids-rich natural gas project in 20 years and a significant leap for the development of the oil and gas industry.