New oil finds fail to quell disquiet over administering of petro dollars
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.
Since ExxonMobil commenced its oil recovery pursuits in 2019, Guyana has become the locale for most of the world’s biggest offshore discoveries in years, its estimated ten billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas having been confirmed from the start of Exxon’s recovery pursuits almost three years ago. In recent times, however, the initial euphoria associated with still far from realised dreams of oil wealth have been supplanted by issues that have to do with just how the resources deriving from oil & gas are to be managed and disbursed. Not unexpectedly, that discourse has extended itself into the political realm.
From what we are being told by ExxonMobil, the recent new discoveries at locations named Fangtooth-1 and Lau Lau 1 wells, will add to the company’s resource estimates. In its now accustomed oil & gas-speak the company said that Fangtooth-1 had “encountered high-quality oilbearing sandstone reservoirs 11 miles (18 km) northwest of its Liza field” and that Lau Lau-1 had encountered “high-quality hydrocarbon-bearing sandstone reservoirs 42 miles (68 km) southeast of Liza.”