ENERGY Caribbean newsletter (April 2014 • Issue no. 72)

PROFILE
Anthony
Ramlackhansingh
Former Petrotrin geologist: deep drilling will reverse TT’s
falling crude production
The fall in crude oil production in
Trinidad and Tobago – output
averaged only 67,804 b/d up
to November 2013, compared with
68,744 b/d in 2012 – really should not
be happening, according to Anthony
Ramlackhansingh, 60, the former
Petrotrin divisional geologist, now an
independent petroleum geo-consultant.
Why? Because there’s more than
enough available to bump that figure up
considerably.
For starters, there’s 800 million to 2
billion barrels of oil awaiting retrieval
from existing reservoirs which are
no longer producing because neither
natural pressure nor pumping can bring
them to the surface. Then there are
around a billion barrels of heavy oil (API
gravity of 18 degrees and below) which
New LNG venture
promises electricity
price relief
[ from page 1 ] the development
of a new sort of gas business where
there isn’t a pipeline. If you look
at the Dominican Republic, they
don’t produce gas but already have
13 trucking companies servicing
their market with LNG as a fuel
source for small industrial plants,
air conditioning systems, service
stations.” The inter-island ferries
can also be converted to run on gas.
LNG bunkering in La Brea is
another possibility. “The potential
is there,” Fisher says. “There is
now a lot of activity around the
concept of gas-fired ships. We
may eventually be able to attract
cruise ships to bunker with gas in
Trinidad.”
has never been tackled with any great
enthusiasm by companies, principally
because it costs more to extract.
On top of all this is entirely new oil,
awaiting access principally by deep
drilling to about 20,000 feet or more.
The three new land blocks awarded
at the start of 2014 (see page 5) –
Ortoire (Touchstone Energy), Rio Claro
(Lease Operators) and St Mary’s (Range
Resources) – are prime candidates
for this, though it remains to be seen
whether any of the 13 exploratory wells
the three companies are contractually
mandated to sink will meet the criteria.
Petrotrin’s Gulf of Paria Trinmar acreage
also has deep horizon prospectivity.
“There is huge upside potential,
greater than one billion barrels of
oil equivalent on land, that requires
deep drilling,” Ramlackhansingh
says. “Integrated seismic and well
interpretation point me to this.” He
is particularly keen on the three new
blocks, “which came out of work I did
for Petrotrin.”
Drilling deep
Deep drilling, of course, is much
more expensive than shallow drilling,
principally because rigs are paid for by
the day and it obviously takes much
longer to sink a well to 20,000 feet
than it does to 10,000 feet. This kind of
expenditure is generally the province
of the bigger companies, though none
of the three block winners fall into that
category.
“Deeper drilling is high-risk but has
great potential,” Ramlackhansingh
points out. “That’s why it requires
attracting the big players – but none
of those presently in Trinidad and
Tobago seem willing to come on shore.”
These include bpTT, Chevron and BHP
Billiton.
Among the bigger players in Trinidad
and Tobago, only BG has ventured
onshore, and it was chasing gas, not oil
– though its Central block does deliver
close to 2,000 b/d of the light oil called
condensate which comes with gas
production.
Ramlackhansingh, who also lectures
in geosciences at the University of the
West Indies (UWI), has been studying
the “big picture” of Trinidad’s southern
basin geology for decades, “looking at
the geology along the Caribbean plate
margin, with a focus on the Trinidad
and Tobago area.”
After obtaining a BSc honours
degree in geology at the University of
Manitoba in Canada, he returned home
and joined the then Trinidad-Tesoro
Petroleum Company, “starting out in
development drilling, which was really
coming up with the single-well type of
in-fill location.”
Big picture
When Trinidad-Tesoro merged with
Trintoc to become today’s Petrotrin,
Ramlackhansingh moved into
exploration and regional geology. “This
gave me the opportunity to study the
whole regional geology of eastern
Venezuela and Trinidad and link up
with old geology.”
He helped inspire Petrotrin’s block
offerings in the late 1990s, the most
successful of which was the Central
block which BG now operates, with
Petrotrin as its joint venture partner.
As a “big picture” man, he found
himself in the position of being “the
first person multinationals wanted to
speak to when they came to Trinidad
and visited Petrotrin.” He will have a lot
more opportunity to do that now he is
an independent consultant.
He also expects to have more time for
his favourite sport, lawn tennis, and for
writing. “I have completed the first draft
of a book on the techno-stratigraphic
evolution of the greater Trinidad and
Tobago area, which will give the whole
history of the basin.”
Ramlackhansingh and his wife have
a 25-year-old son, André, a UWItrained
doctor, now a house officer in
the accident and emergency unit at the
San Fernando General Hospital. “So, if
I take ill suddenly, I know where I am
going!” he grins.
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