EOG’s country manager Lindell Looger, left, and Professor Ken Julien, Natural Gas Export Task Force chairman, hold a model of the Oilbird platform in front of the real thing at Friday’s launch.

Photo: Tony Howell

By Yvonne Webb

The Oilbird platform, the largest, heaviest and most complete structure to be designed and fabricated locally, was launched at La Brea last Friday.

The platform was designed at the industrial estate in La Brea Labidco for EOG Resources at the cost of US$54 million.

Pat Woods EOG’s operations manager said the platform, which is scheduled to be loaded onto a transport barge from Labidco on June 20 and installed on EOG’s SECC Block by J Ray McDermott, is also the first to include a fully independent processing facility.

“Equipment contained on board this platform is capable of processing up to 300 million standard cubic feet of gas per day,” Woods said of the platform which was constructed within 700,000 man hours without a single lost-time accident.

He said the structure, constructed by Tofco, is a conventional drilling and processing steel platform, which consists of six deck legs and three deck levels totalling 28,000 square feet of floor space.

The jacket structure weighs over 1,200 tonnes and the deck structure, together with all its onboard processing equipment, weighs approximately 1,550 tonnes.

“These weights are nearly twice as heavy as any platform previously built in Trinidad. This is a tremendous accomplishment and is also a tangible indicator of the growing capabilities of our local industry,” the operations manager pointed out.

Natural Gas Export Task Force chairman Professor Ken Julien, who launched the platform, said EOG previously described as the “little boy on the block” has made these significant milestones, “as if to say that the little boy is here to stay and can in fact be bigger and more effective than the big boys.”

Julien spoke about the shift from the days when resources and machines were what determined the future or growth of a country.

He said while the industrial revolution with its machinery efficiencies held the key to what happened or did not happen, when one looks at the hydrocarbon resources it is clear that knowledge, ideas, creativity and boldness will be required to take T&T forward.

Julien qualified his position to state that T&T has less than 0.1 per cent of the oil reserves of the world and 0.5 per cent of total world gas reserves.

“If we are to look at that fairly objectively, we would say why a country with such limited gas reserves want to pursue hydrocarbon as the basis of its economy.

“But we are bold enough to do that. We are in a world where knowledge, ideas, boldness, risk-taking have become the important criteria for success.

“It is no longer size, no longer tremendous resources and quite frankly no longer machines.”

Julien drew a parallel with EOG saying 13 years ago it was bold enough, as a small company, to come to a small country like T&T and take a risk which has proven to be quite successful.