Energy Minister Conrad Enill says the Government is scheduled to sign four production sharing contracts (PSCs) with energy sector companies for the exploration of oil and natural gas that involve some $365 million in signing bonuses to the State by the end of the month.

Enill said yesterday the Government was pursuing a "progressive exploratory programme" to ensure there were enough oil and gas supplies to feed existing projects and an estimated US$8.8 billion in gas-based projects now in the works including a proposed ethylene complex.

Enill made the announcements during the annual breakfast meeting with the Prime Minister at the Crowne Plaza hotel, Port of Spain, as the United States Energy Secretary Samuel M Bodman arrived in this country on an official two-day visit yesterday.

Bodman is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Enill during his visit and is to be the feature speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce of Trinidad and Tobago breakfast meeting this morning.

In his address yesterday, Enill highlighted the Government's efforts to increase proven oil and gas reserves.

"With respect to the 2008 bid round, we expect four production (sharing) contracts to be finalised by the third quarter of this year," Enill said.

He then added: "Most of the major issues of these contracts have been agreed and concluded and they would be initialled by the end of May 2008. This would translate into an estimated $365 million in signing bonuses for these contracts by the end of the year."

Enill also said that at the end of the third quarter of this year the Government would be embarking on a round of competitive bidding for five offshore blocks.

Enill said the Government was also pursuing PSCs with the Norwegian State-owned company Statoil for the exploration of a deep water block.

Energy upstream companies that explore for and extract oil and gas such as bpTT and BGTT have said that there are not enough fiscal incentives for deep water activity.

"What is very clear is that we are now entering into a new area of the deep Atlantic and we're learning from the previous deep water bid round that we've had, we've learnt, we've amended the contracts' fiscal arrangements. We're pretty confident that this will in fact provide us with a different result," Enill said.