Technical knowledge needed not a feasibility study

Mar 22, 2018 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
The article in Wednesday’s edition of Kaieteur News captioned “Guyana has to pay ExxonMobil to carry out feasibility study on gas” indicates that the Ministry of Natural Resources lacks adequate technical competencies to support the development of the oil and gas sector.
A simple decision such as whether to capture produced gas from oil wells is one that is made every single day in the oil patch as completion engineers decide whether to run gas sales pipelines. In Texas alone, there are over 500 wells being drilled at any time, and most of these will be completed.
Technical data provide information to Geologists and Engineers to allow determination of how much oil and gas will be produced. Feasibility studies are not needed for this. The mere suggestion that a feasibility study is needed to decide whether Guyana should capture produced gas from the offshore wells shows that there is a lack of knowledge within the Ministry.
This knowledge gap could hurt Guyana is many ways. Without adequate technical competencies, Guyana would be unable to provide oversight of the operations by ExxonMobil or by any other international oil company operating in the country. Lack of knowledge of basic oil field practices will also limit the Government’s ability to ask the right questions when technical solutions are proposed by Exxon; and therefore the Ministry could inadvertently approve actions that could have negative economic and environmental consequences.
Something should be done soon as bad decisions can lead to irreversible damage.
Max Mohamed

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