Saith: Ryder Scott results next month

Saith told Newsday that he saw a presentation of the Ryder Scott audit on Monday and the audit will be discussed at next week’s Cabinet meeting at Whitehall. He said once the audit is discussed by Cabinet, a news conference will be held in the middle of the month to announce its results to the public. The minister declined to say whether or not he was satisfied with the presentation. Saith said this was not an issue because the audit is a report on the status of the country’s petroleum reserves and “the facts are the facts.”

Saith first announced that Government received the 2006 Ryder Scott audit in June at the opening of the GazChem 2007 Conference at the Hilton Trinidad. Saith said the audit “will soon be presented to the national community will give an informed picture of our natural gas reserves.” The minister has said on several occasions that the country has sufficient gas to meet all the energy projects which the Government has approved. At that conference, BpTT vice-president (operations performance unit) Robert Fryar said he had no idea what the 2006 Ryder Scott Audit revealed but based on the company’s 2005 audit, TT’s natural gas reserves appear healthy enough to sustain the energy projects now in train. Fryar said the 2005 audit showed the country had a total of 34.86 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas (18.7 tcf proven, 9.02 tcf probable and 7.06 tcf possible).

He said there was 57.4 tcf of gas in the Columbus Basin classified as “identified exploratory and unidentified exploratory resources” which could be transformed into actual reserves.

Fryar also said unitisation of cross border gas reserves between TT and Venezuela would provide additional gas needed for Government’s industrialisation thrust.

Saith also said he did not know if there were any specific energy matters which Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni would be discussing during the Ugandan leader’s brief visit to TT. However Saith said a framework for technical cooperation on energy matters between TT and other African nations was already in place.

At the African Union conference in Tanzania in January, Manning announced that TT would make its energy expertise available “free of charge to seven West African countries.

Those nations are Angola, Chad, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo.