Thursday, September 13 2012

IN the month of September and continuing into October, Trinidad and Tobago’s two largest natural gas producers, bpTT and BG TT will be conducting maintenance works on the Kapok and Dolphin platforms respectively.

This is in keeping with the need to ensure asset integrity, compliance with international safety standards and the long term sustainability of the nation’s natural gas supply. The Ministry of Energy and Energy Affairs is working closely with the companies involved to assist in any way possible during this period.

The bpTT Kapok installation has been operating off the South East coast of Trinidad for the past ten years and bpTT has a planned turnaround for this facility. This turnaround is to ensure compliance with both industry and BP standards. The facility is expected to be offline for approximately 50 days starting September 3rd 2012 to allow for inspections and upgrades to equipment and to ensure the safety and reliability of the facility. This turnaround has also been planned ahead of the Kapok drilling programme due to commence in early 2013. That drilling programme is expected to increase the deliverability of natural gas from the Kapok facility.

With regard to the BG TT Dolphin platform, this installation has been operational for 16 years and will be down for planned maintenance for 34 days from September 18.

During the period that these two platforms will be offline, companies in Point Lisas will take the opportunity to execute planned maintenance works. These companies include Phoenix Park Gas Processors Limited, Yara Trinidad Limited, PCS Nitrogen Trinidad Limited and Methanex Trinidad. It should be noted that each of these companies have more than one plant and not all of them will be offline at the same time.

To shelter the natural gas supply shortfall, Atlantic LNG has also planned maintenance activity during this period. Train 2 will have an outage of 28 days starting September 18th 2012. The Train 2 programme is part of the train’s ten year maintenance and inspection plan. Maintenance activities on both Train 1 and Train 2 are designed to ensure the continued integrity and reliability of the plant well into the future.

The National Gas Company (NGC), Atlantic’s upstream partners and the Point Lisas Energy Association (PLEA) have all been working together to ensure that all the offline activity across the country is coordinated and optimised in order to minimise the impact of the planned activities.

In light of the impending maintenance programmes, service contractors have been gearing up for the activity. This includes sending their workers for basic HSE training, which is a requirement for working on these platforms and plants. The Energy Chamber which conducts assessments for HSE requirements has reported that it has completed more than 2,000 of these assessments in August 2012.

The Ministry of Energy and Energy Affairs in collaboration with the NGC assures the public that there will be no disruption of natural gas supply to companies involved in the generation of power and the light industrial consumer sector.