So accustomed have Guyanese become to continual disclosures by ExxonMobil of successive ‘world class’ oil discoveries in the Guyana/Suriname Basin that this week’s disclosure by the largest US oil producer on Wednesday January 5, that it had made two further oil discoveries in the Stabroek Block, off Guyana’s coast, an area described as one of the company’s “top bets” for production growth in the decade ahead, evoked no notable response amongst the Guyanese public as a whole.
These days, by far the greater national interest insofar as the country’s oil & gas resources are concerned reposes in the political realm and is, these days, characterised by acrimonious exchanges across the political divide that are centred on the administering of the country’s oil resources, particularly, protecting those resources from partisan political control. How the country’s oil resources, more specifically, its anticipated billions in earnings therefrom, are to be dispersed and more immediately, how to strike a balance between the prerogatives of foreign investors and the local content benefits to be derived by Guyanese investors. There has been, as well, vigorous discourse over how best to protect the country’s oil & gas earnings from political control… the origins of the discourse spawned by the historic mistrust that extends far beyond the oil & gas saga.
