Dr Raymond Wright, energy consultant to the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica.
Jamaica is to undertake a new offshore survey for signs of oil and gas as well as open another round of bidding for exploration rights in the waters to the west of the island next year, a senior government energy official, Dr Raymond Wright, has disclosed.
"We want to attract interest in the Jamaican region over the 12-15 months, said Wright. But he was clear that Jamaica would entertain production-sharing regimes only with bidders.
"We operate on a production sharing arrangement - no royalty, no signature bonuses - and it's based on a production split entirely, and perhaps a small training fee."
At the same time, Wright told an energy conference in Trinidad and Tobago last week that the Australian consortium, Finder/Gippsland, one firm that gained exploration rights after the last round of bidding three years ago, should begin sinking wells in the Pedro Banks area in the last quarter of next year or early 2010.
Finder/Gippsland has five blocks - numbers 6,7,10, 11 and 12 - of the dozen that were auctioned in the last bid and Wright said that they will drill first in either block six or seven, or both.
"We expect some finds from what they are now promoting or what they believe," Wright, a former managing director of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ), who now acts a consultant to the state-owned energy company, told the Port of Spain seminar.
"They (Finder/Gippsland) believe there are significant quantities of oil, billions of barrels, in some of these structures, billions (of cubic metres) of natural gas as well."
The other companies with offshore oil exploration rights in Jamaica from the last round of bidding are Rainville of Calvary, Canada, which has licences for three blocks — 9, 13 and 14— in the Pedro Banks region; and Hong Kong-based, Proteam, which has four blocks - 1, 5, 8, and 17.
According to Wright, a Norwegian company, Wavefield Inseis ASA, has been contracted by PCJ to conduct a seismic survey on the open 19-block acreage on the broad exploration, beginning in the second half of February.
Wavefield Inseis' survey, Wright said, will be "on a multi-client basis using a long streamer and looking at the deep seated information that can be garnered from the cretaceous".
"There is a significant potential of petroleum system in the cretaceous that we will want to look at and which this new seismic data will provide," he said.
Formal bid round
Based on this information, the formal bid round will take place in December 2009 or January 2010, Wright said.
Jamaica, which imports over 90 per cent of its energy needs, expects to be strong interest in the blocks by the time it goes to tender, given its expectation that oil prices, will, by then, have stabilised and back on an upward tick.
"We expect significant interest because we believe that oil prices which will be moving downwards during the next few months will start to respond upward," Wright said.
"We will begin to see a revitalisation of interest in oil and gas exploration in a year from now when oil prices will have already begun moving in the realm of US$60 to US$70 a barrel."
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