BP Trinidad and Tobago (BPTT) on Tuesday ramped up natural gas production from its Angelin development, adding to growing stores of available export capacity from the twin-island nation.

The Angelin development, started up on time and budget, originally was discovered via the El Diablo well in 1995. Angelin includes a platform and four wells about 60 kilometers (37 miles) off the southeast coast of Trinidad in 65 meters (213 feet) of water.

The new platform, BPTT’s 15th installation offshore Trinidad & Tobago (T&T), has a production capacity of 600 MMcf/d. Gas flows from the platform to the existing Serrette hub via a new 21-kilometer (13-mile) pipeline.

“This safe and successful start-up, less than two years after sanction, is a credit to our BP teams and contractors,” upstream CEO Bernard Looney said. “Angelin is BP’s 22nd in the latest of new upstream projects to come online in just over three years and reflects our commitment to do what said we would, safely and competitively.”

BPTT’s Claire Fitzpatrick, regional president, said the company was delivering on a promise to produce first gas from Angelin during 1Q2019.

“Angelin is the next step in fulfilling our long-term development plan in Trinidad and will play an important role in enabling us to deliver our production commitments, which could potentially include up to $8 billion of investment in several more major projects over the next 10 years,” she said.

Angelin, sanctioned in 2017 following a gas sales agreement with Trinidad’s National Gas Co., is BPTT’s first major project development supported using ocean bottom cable seismic acquisition with advanced processing. The advanced seismic enhances imaging of the reservoirs in the Columbus Basin offshore Trinidad.

BPTT two years ago started up two other Trinidad gas projects, Juniper and Trinidad Onshore Compression (TROC).

Juniper, the company’s 14th offshore platform, was the largest project to start up in Trinidad in several years, and BPTT’s first subsea field development in the country. Juniper alone boosted BPTT gas production capacity by around 590 MMcf/d.

The TROC project is able to deliver up to 200 MMcf/d of gas. The improved capacity allowed BPTT to increase output from low-pressure wells in existing acreage in the Columbus Basin, using an additional inlet compressor for liquefied natural gas (LNG) at the Point Fortin Atlantic LNG facility.

BPTT in December sanctioned two more gas projects: Cassia Compression, set to come onstream in 2021, and Matapal, now planned for 2022.

Cassia would enable BPTT to access and produce low pressure gas reserves from producing fields in the Greater Cassia Area, maximizing recovery from the existing resources. The project involves constructing the Cassia C platform, which would be BPTT’s 16th offshore facility.

Gas production from the Greater Cassia Area would be routed to Cassia C for compression before being exported via the adjacent existing Cassia B platform.

The Matapal project is to develop the gas resources discovered by BPTT in 2017 with the Savannah exploration well. The project, a three-well subsea tie-back to the existing Juniper platform, would have production capacity of 400 MMcf/d.

BP, the No. 1 natural gas marketer in North America for many years, has expanded its LNG capacity without too much publicity. In addition to Atlantic Basin growth, BP has LNG prospects in Australia’s Northwest Shelf, and it is to have three LNG trains at the Tangguh project in Indonesia. It also has offtake agreements for the prospective LNG export project in Mozambique with Eni SpA.

Angelin is BP’s third major upstream project start-up in 2019, following Constellation in the Gulf of Mexico and the second stage of the West Nile Delta development offshore Egypt.

BPTT is T&T’s largest hydrocarbon producer, accounting for more than half of the national production of oil and gas, with exploration and production licenses covering 904,000 acres.

T&T in the early 2000s served as the major source of LNG for what was at the time a thirsty U.S. market, and the nation supplied almost 80% of U.S. imported gas. T&T’s good fortune was fueled by a partnership between BP, the former BG plc (now part of Royal Dutch Shell plc), Spain’s Repsol SA and the National Gas Co. of T&T to build the first of four large LNG plants. The venture began exporting gas in 1999.