Latest update January 18th, 2025 2:52 AM
Guyana’s oil needs minimum refining – Trotman
By Abena Rockcliffe-Campbell
Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman
Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman has indicated that Guyana’s oil is of top quality. He even boasted that the crude needs minimum refining. This, the Minister pointed out at a recent press conference in response to a question posed by Kaieteur News.
Trotman told the media, “We made a find of petroleum oil; liquid oil and I should have walked with a vial of it so you could smell it. It is such good crude, sweet oil they call it, that it doesn’t take much refining. I will walk with a vial so you can actually smell. It can be poured into a vehicle with minimum refining.”
Trotman said that word about the quantity and quality of oil found in Guyana has already begun to spread. He said that Guyana is being deemed on the international stage as number one in the world with good prospects for oil and gas.
The Minister indicated that some of the senior executives of Siemens, which is one of the largest companies in the world, will be flying into Guyana in another two weeks to meet with government representatives.
Trotman noted that Halliburton, another major company, is also looking to put a foot in Guyana.
He said also, “Shell was with Exxon on the Stabroek block and pulled out. They now maybe rue the day that they ever did that. Now, Shell has signaled that it wants to come back to Guyana.”
Trotman said that those companies are only expressing interest because ExxonMobil has de-risked the basin. “Zero from Zero is nothing…If you have oil and no one is troubling it, then it is worth zero. The oil may be worth a lot, but only if it is produced. We are moving to production, but it took ExxonMobil to find what others have been looking for.”
Trotman continued, “We are going to be inheriting more money than we can ever imagine and can begin to spend, and it is how we are going to manage this money that will determine the future of this country. The question should not always be why we did not get more. There is a sense that we need more, more, more. With an economy where it is now and the population where it is now with less than a million people, each one of us is going to be wealthy in US dollars in a few years’ time.”
Trotman also noted that Guyana no longer qualifies for certain borrowing facilities “because we are about to be extremely wealthy, where we can turn around and lend people.”
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