Left: Ruth Potopsingh, group managing director of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica. Right: Dr Raymond Wright, energy consultant to the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica. - File

Jamaica and Columbia are also moving forward on plans to develop a 'joint regime' of marine territory covering 52,000 square kilometres to be explored for oil and natural gas.

The agreement was signed more than a month ago for acquisition of geophysical data, but on Wednesday group managing director of Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica, Ruth Potopsingh said the parties were still ironing out a management plan on the seismic data collection and sharing of resources.

An update on the bilateral programme first came from PCJ consultant Dr Raymond Wright at an energy conference in Trinidad at the twilight of 2008.

"We will be inviting a seismic company to conduct a multi-client survey in this acreage next year," Wright said in Port-of-Spain. "We will then be developing a number of blocks in this joint regime area and going out to licensing based on either the concessionary arrangements of Columbia or more likely the production sharing of Jamaica," Dr Wright told the conference.

He said that at a meeting in November there was consensus that the joint regime would be based on Jamaica's production sharing model.

"We are beginning to plan the legal jurisdiction under which we will operate because we don't want to build a bridge to nowhere, so to speak," he added.

But the details have not yet been fleshed out, Potopsingh said Wednesday.

"Those are matters that the management plan will work out," she told the Financial Gleaner.

Regimes areas

To get insight into how some joint regime areas should or can be developed, the teams have looked at East Timor and Australia; and Sao Tome and Principe and Nigeria.

"We are coming up with some ideas on our own, but what it would entail would be that the resources would be developed jointly and they would split on some sort of formula, let us say it would be 50-50 or half and half. It will be developed, perhaps, by a joint development authority which would have representatives from Jamaica and Colombia, and they would be under the control of a ministerial team," said Wright.

The joint regime is to be opened up to exploration "in the next two or so years," he said.

The Jamaica region, he said, will have 19 blocks for exploration, plus a significant number of other blocks of potential reserves that seismic research data indicate are in the joint regime area.

Environmental studies

Jamaica is also working with the Colombians on developing baseline environmental studies in the joint area.

"So we are on track, very busy and we are hopeful," said Wright.

"We hope, we really hope and we can and we believe that we will and we also believe that the force is with us."

Jamaica has for five decades been surveying for fossil fuel, but has not to date found deposits in sufficient quantities to justify commercial exploration.

Another round of surveys is underway by the Finder/Gippsland partnership, which has exploration licenses for five blocks, Rainville of has for three, and Hong Kong-based company Proteam owns exploration rights to four offshore blocks. Norweigan company, Wavefield Inseis, has also been invited to conduct a multi-client seismic survey on the open 19 block acreage during the second half of February.

Energy imported

Wright who has worked in the energy industry for three decades said Jamaica imports 93 per cent of the energy it consumes. The oil bill amounts to 25 per cent of GDP, and was estimated at US$2.2 billion per year.

Jamaica's international reserves have been depleted this year by nearly 40 per cent due sub-stantially, but not entirely, to the importation of oil, which climbed to record highs in the first seven months of 2008.

"We do have to look at how we treat with our energy dilemma and predicament," said Dr Wright. Jamaica has also been developing indigenous resources such as wind, hydropower, solar, waste and biomass of all types, under the programme of energy security.

"We've had significant interest and action in terms of the use of bio-fuels. We have now introduced methanol at 10 per cent into our gasolene and by the first of May will be completed throughout the country," he said.

Also under consideration as a renewable is castor bean for bio-diesel.

"In the meantime we are searching deliberately, maybe not desperately, for what oil and gas resources we believe are in our part of the Caribbean area, the Nicaraguan Rise. We are optimistic that we will find some oil and gas over the next five or so years and the effort that we are making will be worth it," Wright said at the Port-of-Spain forum.

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