Introduction
Today’s column has two primary goals. The first is to provide non-specialist readers, after five successive weekly columns, with a brief re-cap of the distinguishing elements of the Buxton Proposal. At the risk of some repetition, this is done solely for the convenience of such readers. And the second goal is to introduce the key petroleum metrics that undergird the economics and finances of the Buxton Proposal.
Before pursuing these two goals, I take the opportunity here and now to debunk the fake news as well as the noise and nonsense that, relentlessly, keep representing, falsely, the global crude oil industry, as if it was still dominated by the production and trade of “big oil” or transnational corporations, TNCs. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I record once more here that, as far back as May 2010 a decade before Guyana’s first oil, Ian Bremmer had reminded us in the Wall Street Journal that, the leading global producers of crude oil were all state-owned National Oil Companies, NOCs. NOCs accounted for 75 percent of global output then and were home to several oil revenues-to-cash-for-citizens transfers.
