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Shell announces readiness to start Guyana offshore oil exploration
Oil giant, Shell, has signaled its intentions to start exploring for oil off Guyana shortly.
Shell has begun nudging its way into Guyana’s offshore oil exploration.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the oil giant, Shell, will begin exploring for oil near the South American country in hopes that they will discover reserves similar to those of the Jubilee field in Ghana.
According to the report, though it may seem nonsensical as the entire Atlantic Ocean separates South America from Africa, researchers are hopeful, given that the two continents were once united prior to millions of years of continental drift.
The theory that the same oil-bearing geological formations may exist on both sides of an ocean has similarly directed attention to Angola after the 2007 discovery of the Tupi oil fields in Brazil. Brazil is now the world’s fifteenth largest oil producer and the second largest in South America following Venezuela.
Oil prices, according to the article, are dependent on production and consumption, and market trading activity. Should exploration in Guyana pay off, this could quickly turn one of the world’s most under-explored areas into the newest hotspot, resulting in high supplies that could moderate, and possibly lower, heating oil prices.
Shell is not the first super-major to dip its toes in the waters of northern South America. Exxon Mobil Corp. has exploration rights in the huge Stabroek block offshore Guyana, though it’s tight-lipped about what it found there. Smaller companies like Canadian independent CGX Energy are also present there.
But the area remains one of the most under-explored in the world. There’s some data from the 1970s, when Elf Aquitaine and Exxon drilled two dry wells.
But from then on it was virtually ignored by the majors. That’s changed with the discovery of Jubilee.
The idea that areas on either side of oceans could have the same oil-bearing structures is now well-established.
After billions of barrels of oil were found in the “pre-salt” areas offshore Brazil, many began to wonder whether the ultra-deep waters off the coast of Angola, directly across the Atlantic, might bring forth similar treasures.
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