Touchstone

Canadian multinational E&P company Touchstone Exploration is one of the largest independent onshore oil producers in Trinidad and Tobago, with stakes in 22 blocks. The company’s approach involves focusing on natural gas and high-production wells. While current activities are centred on Trinidad, Touchstone is looking at politically stable, hydrocarbons-rich markets for potential expansion.

• Exploration: The company’s exploration efforts are focused on its Ortoire block, in which it holds an 80% operated working interest.
• Production: As of March 2020, Touchstone was producing 1,700 bpd. Production is centred on several key assets: Coora (Block 1 & 2), WD-4, WD-8 and Fyzabad.
• Heritage JV: Touchstone is involved in a joint venture with state-owned Heritage Petroleum. The company operates the WD-4 and Coora fields under a lease-operatorship agreement (LOA) with the NOC. The partners are striving for long-term well optimisation at these assets.
• EOR with environmental benefits: Touchstone is bringing enhanced recovery to its development blocks in the form of waterflooding, which it launched on the WD-8 block. Waterflooding allows the company to return its produced water to the reservoir and avoid releasing effluent.

Touchstone aims to become the largest onshore producer in Trinidad and Tobago aside from Heritage Petroleum. With around half of its assets in production so far, the company plans to maintain an aggressive drilling programme to maximise operational efficiencies and bring production on stream as quickly as possible.

• 2020: Highlights of the year included a gas sales deal with NGC for all gas produced at Ortoire, a gas discovery at the Ortoire block (Chinook-1), spudding of the Cascadura Deep-1 well ahead of schedule and its finding “significant hydrocarbon accumulations,” the securing of a USD 20-million term loan and the raising of more than USD 40 million from share placing for further exploration at Ortoire.
• 2019: While waiting to determine the future of its LOAs with Heritage, the company focused on exploration at Ortoire.
• 2017-2018: Touchstone drilled 15 development wells on its four lease operatorship blocks.