Having gone almost entirely unnoticed in the global oil & gas industry for decades, both Guyana and neighbouring Suriname are now claiming their respective shares of the global spotlight. With the US company ExxonMobil having begun to recover and export oil from the now well-known Stabroek Block, late last year, less than five years after it announced its first major offshore discovery here, Suriname’s ‘shout’ followed in April this year when the Texas oil company Apache Corp. announced that it had made “a significant oil discovery” at its Sapakara West-1 well in the Guyana/ Suriname basin.
Last week it was disclosed that the Malaysian Oil and Gas Company, Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas), currently operating in the Surinamese oil sector, had secured the services of a semi-submersible driller, owned by the drilling-rig operator Maersk, to undertake a one-well drilling contract, offshore Suriname.
