-former TT Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine

FORMER Energy Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kevin Ramnarine believes that the projected daily production rate of both Liza Phases 1 and 2 will be incredible.
He was speaking at a press briefing held in the media room at the Guyana Marriott Hotel on Wednesday following a break in the presentations at the Guyana International Petroleum Business Summit (GIPEX 2018). Earlier in the day, it was announced that ExxonMobil and its joint venture partners HESS and CNOOC Nexen were eyeing the development of Liza Phase 2 with an estimated daily production of 220,000 barrels. This is on top of the Liza Phase 1 which is projected to have a rate of production of 120,000 barrels per day.

“So you are looking at 340,000 barrels per day by 2022…Trinidad’s highest ever oil production was 229,500 barrels [per day] in the year 1978. So the scale of what is happening here is incredible,” he said.

He noted that after Liza Phase 2, Payara is next to be developed…“and then there are other fields in the inventory to be developed, such as the Turbot field and Snoek and of course Ranger 1,” he said. “I don’t have a figure but we are looking at something very large [in terms of] barrels per day,” Ramnarine pointed out. “Guyana is going to have a spectacular rise in production and that is going to fundamentally transform this place,” he said.

With regards to the lessons Guyana can learn from Trinidad and Tobago, Ramnarine said there were things his country got right and things that they did not. “Guyana has to study that. Guyana has to study other things too,” he said. In highlighting what Trinidad did not get right, he noted productivity was one of them. “We have been losing our competitiveness in our oil and gas industry and a manifestation of that is that in 2017, BP was supposed to have fabricated a new platform in Trinidad and the decision was taken to move that to the United States because fabrication yards there are so much more competitive and productive,” he said.

He noted too that the industrial relations climate around the energy sector was another downfall of that country and one of the things Guyana must get right. “We have had a situation where for the last month we had protests outside a plant which is being constructed in South Trinidad,” he said. Another pitfall Guyana can avoid is to start its sovereign wealth fund early, unlike Trinidad which established theirs in the 1990s and with over 100 years in oil. “I think we started that too late…we should have started it much earlier. I think Guyana is planning to start it from day one,” he said. “We started our fund in 1999 and we now have US $5.2 billion. I think with the benefit of hindsight we should have started it decades before,” he said.