BP Plc’s (NYSE:BP) subsidiary BP Trinidad and Tobago (“BPTT”) signed a production-sharing agreement with Trinidad last week for the giant Cypre subsea gas development, and is now targeting first gas in 2025, Zacks reports.
Cypre is BPTT’s third subsea development in the region and is poised to significantly enhance the country’s natural gas production capacity.
Trinidad and Tobago’s natural gas production has been declining, making the Cypre project critical for the twin island country. Average production for the first half of 2024 clocked in at 2.48 billion cubic feet per day, down from 2.64 billion cubic feet per day in 2023. According to former Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine, projects like BP Cypre and EOG Mento will help offset production losses but may still prove insufficient to spark a significant production surge.
Trinidad’s annual gas output has been on a tailspin for years now, dropping from 1.479 tcf in 2012, to 0.988 tcf in 2022 in large part due to declining gas reserves in mature gas fields, overshadowing discoveries in neighboring countries and unappealing fiscal terms. But its Latin American peers are doing no better.
Currently, among LAM countries, only Trinidad & Tobago and Perus export LNG. Peru has actually fared better than most of its neighbors. The country has seen its LNG gas exports soar amid the global energy crisis that was triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Back in 2022, Peru LNG, the consortium responsible for the country’s exports, increased its LNG deliveries by 70% while shipments to Europe alone saw a 46-fold increase.
The Peruvian government even discarded the renegotiation of the consortium’s Camisea contracts in a bid to encourage the consortium to export at full capacity of 4.4 MTPA. Unfortunately, Peru has little capacity to expand exports at this juncture as the government focuses on supplying the local population.
Meanwhile, Brazil remains one of the largest LNG importers in the region despite having more regasification capacity than any other country in the region. Indeed, Brazil is the sixth largest importer of U.S. LNG globally.
Source: By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com