Introduction
For a country that will soon become petroleum dependent, Guyana’s petroleum legislation is not particularly expansive. There are two petroleum Acts – the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act comprising seventy-one sections and the largely gutted Petroleum (Production) Act which is now something of a misnomer since all it does is vest the ownership of petroleum resources found in Guyana in the State. That Act has a mere two sections. Then there is the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Regulations made in 1986 comprising thirty-nine paragraphs, one Schedule containing four Forms, one of which has a First and a Second Schedule.
The word “environment” does not appear in any one of the Acts, and only adverbially in the Regulations in which pollution appears a few times. Fortunately, in 1996 the PPP/C Government passed into law the Environmental Protection Act (EPA). Accordingly, it was under the EPA that an environmental permit was issued on June 1, 2017 valid until 2040 for the Liza Phase 1 Project. This 46th column in the series looks at the conditions under which the environmental aspects of the petroleum operations are required to be conducted.
