Envisioning oil

While preparing to make an intervention in a panel discussion on the future of the oil and gas sector in Guyana a few weeks ago, I came to realise that although I had been reading the almost daily commentaries, I must have missed it but I did not have a broad vision of where the sector is going. Envisioning a future sets the stage for present action, and so I began to piece together a view by considering aspects of where we were and where we are going, in the hope of acquiring an understanding  of where we will likely end up. It is quite easy to be knowledgeable after the fact, but given the task I set myself, some amount of retrospective analysis was inevitable and is helpful in foreseeing and preventing future mistakes. This intervention will take more than one article, and a few of my conclusions speak to our laughably alarming state of unpreparedness! 

To create an analytical framework, I recalled a 2013 lecture given by a world renowned expert, Professor Paul Collier, at the London School of Economics called ‘Reversing the Resource Curse: How to Harness Natural Resource Wealth for Accelerated Development.’ (http://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=1803). Conditions might have changed somewhat since then and the Professor was here last year warning against tearing up the agreement with Exxon but I still found what he had to say about the general process of transformative development useful.