Energy chamber welcomes news of OFAC licence

The Energy Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago has expressed happiness over the award of a specific licence to the National Gas Company, bp and the Trinidad and Tobago Government to negotiate an agreement to develop natural gas resources in the Manakin-Coquina field, one of three natural gas deposits that straddle the border between Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.

The chamber said in a release, “There are huge gas resources within the Plataforma Deltana region of Venezuela and in fields that straddle the maritime boundary with TT. Delivering natural gas by pipeline from those fields to Trinidad for processing through our world-class LNG and petrochemical industry offers a major opportunity for TT. Venezuela and countries around the world that are reliant upon imported gas and petrochemicals to fuel their economies.”

Bringing the gas resources to TT was one of the six points in the chamber's plan for the industry, it said.

“As well as delivering much-needed gas to the downstream industry, the work involved in drilling and installing infrastructure on new gas fields offers important opportunities for many members of the Energy Chamber,” the release added.

Last week Energy Minister Stuart Young announced that the US Government had awarded TT a license to explore for natural gas in the gas field.

The Manakin-Coquina field is the second largest of the fields that straddle the TT/Venezuela border, with a capacity of at least one trillion cubic feet (tcf) of proven gas reserves.

The largest of the three is the more well-known Loran/Manatee field, with the Manatee side of the field sitting within TT’s borders and having a capacity of 2.7 tcf out of a total of about seven tcf in the entire field. The smallest of the fields is the Kapok/Dorado field, which has a capacity of about 0.31 tcf.