Stabroek News

The oil find in Guyana is huge

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Dear Editor, We don’t need to hear about the personal sacrifices of politician­s during past political campaigns or the hardships of being a leader, especially when such inflated speech is used as a means to defend the worst contract ever agreed upon, if opportunit­y losses to Guyana are computed on a per capita basis in the Production Sharing Agreement between Guyana on one side and Exxon Mobil, Hess, and CNOOC on the other. What we really heard is a hot air blast of arrogance, verbosity, and self-glorificat­ion from one of Guyana’s most skilful communicat­ors.

Simply put, the oil find in Guyana is so huge that even extreme incompeten­ce and mismanagem­ent will not substantia­lly mitigate the spouting flow of wealth and value that will occur in Guyana from 2020 and continue for the long term.

Using the World Atlas. com oil data table, dated January 11, 2018, I have modified the rankings, by including Guyana’s oil reserves on a per capita basis, for comparison against the world’s top twenty countries with the largest proven oil reserves:

On January 17, 2018, a Bloomberg article noted: “The world’s hottest offshore prospect for oil companies is off the coast of Guyana, where a string of major discoverie­s has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in a quest for crude.

Michael Fitzsimmon­s in his January 26, 2018 article for Seeking Alpha (a crowdsourc­ed content service for financial markets); highlighte­d the following:

Exxon has made six discoverie­s in the deep-water offshore of Guyana.

Associated recoverabl­e reserves are now up to 3.2 billion Barrels of oil equivalent (BOE).

To put that into perspectiv­e, that’s 200,000 Barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOE/D) for 43 years.

Exxon needed a big reserves replacemen­t after de-booking massive oil sands reserves last year. It found them.

It is well known within the oil industry that corporatio­ns tend to be conservati­ve on their estimated recoverabl­e oil reserves. In addition, to the foregoing, exploratio­n in Guyana’s offshore is at an early stage and it is much more probable than possible that Guyana’s recoverabl­e oil reserve will exceed the ten billion BOE.

ExxonMobil is the single largest publicly traded oil corporatio­n in the world, with a market cap of just under US$380 billion, and more significan­tly for Guyana, Exxon Mobil is a quintessen­tial United States corporatio­n, the country that by a substantia­l gap is the world’s top military superpower. Yours faithfully, Nigel Hinds

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