GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um CEO Erik Kesku­la  says as­set im­prove­ment is need­ed for the com­pa­ny to get the most out of its ma­ture fields. 

He made the com­ments while speak­ing dur­ing a pan­el on the sec­ond day of the T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence, which took place at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain.

Kesku­la said in­no­va­tion and tech­nol­o­gy can be used to ac­cess such im­prove­ment, ex­plain­ing, “Util­is­ing things like wire­less and re­mote mon­i­tor­ing to re­duce the mean time to re­spond when a well goes down or a fa­cil­i­ty goes down, but work­ing close­ly with the mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty, part­ner­ships with our ser­vice com­pa­nies to do that and these as­sets, ac­tu­al­ly have some ad­van­tages.”

How­ev­er, he said when work­ing in these ma­ture ar­eas there are two ad­van­tages.

One, Kesku­la iden­ti­fied is be­ing a bridge to big projects as the ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture is al­ready in place.

“So I can be faster to get my oil on­line in those ma­ture ar­eas. Sec­ond­ly, the cap­i­tal has al­ready been spent for that in­fra­struc­ture so they tend to be less cap­i­tal in­ten­sive, mean­ing the eco­nom­ics can look a lit­tle bit bet­ter and be de­liv­ered faster,” he added.

Kesku­la added that as work con­tin­ues to im­prove, re­cov­ery fac­tors with tech­nol­o­gy and mod­erni­sa­tion, there re­mains re­al op­por­tu­ni­ty to lever­age those ma­ture fields to be “the bridge for the big projects on the hori­zon.”

Al­so speak­ing on the pan­el was Touch­stone’s Pres­i­dent and Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer, Paul Baay, who said tax­es re­main a huge bur­den for en­er­gy com­pa­nies want­i­ng to do busi­ness in T&T.

“When you think about 12 and a half per cent roy­al­ty on oil and there is SPT (Sup­ple­men­tal Pe­tro­le­um Tax) and that is an­oth­er 18 and half per cent roy­al­ty when oil gets over US$75 a bar­rel. We got a Green Fund Levy of about five per cent (0.3 per cent of gross in­come) and then a cor­po­rate tax rate that can be up to 55 per cent af­ter all of that. You pile all of that on top of each oth­er it gets to a very very big num­ber,” he ex­plained.

Baay added that this coun­try has a ma­ture basin which means there ought to be a dif­fer­ent in­cen­tive.

Mean­while, Mala Bali­raj, chair of the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T, who spoke on day one of the con­fer­ence, not­ed that the in­dus­try is rapid­ly chang­ing and the skills need­ed in the sec­tor are be­ing trans­formed through digi­ti­sa­tion, au­toma­tion and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.

She ad­vised there must be greater fo­cus on pro­grammes that in­vest heav­i­ly in train­ing new young peo­ple en­ter­ing the in­dus­try, as well as re­train­ing the ex­ist­ing work­force.

The is­sue of im­prov­ing the ease of do­ing busi­ness is al­so cru­cial if we are to cre­ate the cli­mate for in­vest­ment in pro­duc­tion, de­car­bon­i­sa­tion and peo­ple, Bali­raj added.