Guyana Oil and Gas News

Introduction Today’s column addresses three tasks.  First, wrapping-up last week’s evaluation of National Budgets [2021/ 2022] as providers of Government of Guyana, GoG, indicators on the condition of Guyana’s oil and gas sector.

The independent Norway-based energy research and business intelligence company, Rystad Energy, has tagged Guyana as being among two other named countries and a region that will attract most of the growth in investment in the global oil & gas industry in 2022.

The international oil companies ExxonMobil and Shell Plc. face what a May 16 Bloomberg report describes as “expensive offshore exploration setbacks” to their plans to turn Brazil into a major oil & gas profit centre. 

In two weeks Guyana will get another lift of one million barrels of oil from the Liza Unity FPSO – its second platform – and will again do its own marketing using competitive bidding, Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat disclosed yesterday.

Environmentalist Simone Mangal-Joly is calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put a pause on all future projects with ExxonMobil until the company begins to fully comply with the various environmental laws.

The EPA has renewed the Environmental Permit for ExxonMobil’s Liza 1 development in the Stabroek Block offshore Guyana for five years even as the company continues to commit flaring violations owing to the failed gas compressor onboard the Liza Destiny FPSO. 

 Introduction Thus far I have considered four of the ten sample indicators, which I had earlier advanced can provide an adequate profile of the present condition of Guyana’s emergent oil and gas sector: namely 1) existential threats, Venezuelan territorial aggression and environmental catastrophe; 2) modelled cost shares for crude oil production; 3) oil price projection; and 4) the World Bank’s call on Guyana’s boom cycle. 

DUBAI/ATHENS, (Reuters) – Iranian forces seized two Greek tankers in the Gulf yesterday, shortly after Tehran warned it would take “punitive action” against Athens over the confiscation of Iranian oil by the United States from a tanker held off the Greek coast.

ExxonMobil shareholders on Wednesday supported a measure calling on the oil major to lay out how a rapid global shift away from fossil fuels would affect its finances, according to the Financial Times (FT).

Nearly 22 months after it took office, the PPP/C Government yesterday finally signed a deal to audit a whopping US$9b in expenses claimed by ExxonMobil and its partners  which could help to establish whether this country is receiving all of the oil profits it should.

Following concerns over the repeated use of one consultant for the environmental surveys for ExxonMobil’s operations here, a different company was selected for the oil major’s fifth planned offshore project but the controversy is likely to rumble on.

While stating that they welcome development and fully support the planned gas-to-shore project, residents of the lower end of the West Bank of Demerara were on Friday mainly concerned about if jobs would be available and if some of them would be displaced by the planned pipeline but they got no satisfactory answers.

An informal follow up conversation with a gathering of local agro-processors who participated in the recent Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association –staged UncappeD event at the Providence Stadium has yielded the opinion that the likely single biggest government failure up until now in terms of support for the growth of the country’s agro processing sector has been its inability, up until now, to provide a facility that will enable the country’s agro-processors to undertake “end-to-end” manufacture and packaging of their produce to a point of them leaving the facility with “ready for market” products.

Contending that what, in some instances, are their considerable unrecovered hydrocarbon resources should not become subject to recovery time lines set by rich countries, African nations like Angola contend that such timelines can only be determined by the vicissitudes of growth and development in those countries.

Nowhere in the hemisphere have the risks associated with the oil industry been more graphically illustrated recently than in Peru when, back in January, a tanker spilled oil at a refinery owned by the Spanish oil company Repsol, the mishap reportedly directly affecting more than 700,000 Peruvians and causing the authorities there to have to effect an elaborate and costly cleanup.

Amid controversy over the use of one consultant for all of its environmental impact studies, ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) has revealed that the next study will not be executed by ERM.

Introduction Today’s column continues the coverage of my linking of the theoretical analysis; that is Pillars A B  completed so far and policy formulation for the sector, to come.

The US$200 million (which equates to some $41.7 billion) from Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund (NRF) held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was transferred on Wednesday to this country’s Central Bank and will be subsequently deposited into the Consolidated Fund for spending, this newspaper understands.

What to make of President Nicolas Maduro’s incremental moves to extract his country’s oil & gas industry from the conundrum in which it finds itself is not an easy matter on which to make a definitive determination.

For the vast majority of small business owners who turned up at the recent UncappeD event at the Providence Stadium two weekends ago, the event served as a timely release valve for one of the sectors of the Guyana economy that had suffered most under the punishing regime of the coronavirus pandemic which appears, for the time being at least, to have subsided somewhat.