Exxon had intended to flare all the gas from Liza Phase One – Fmr. Presidential Advisor

Mar 16, 2021 News

By Kemol King

Flaring at the Liza Destiny FPSO, in December 2020

Kaieteur News – ExxonMobil, according to former presidential advisor, Dr. Jan Mangal, had first intended to flare all the associated gas from the Liza Phase One operation.
Dr. Mangal said that in a July 2016 interview, while he did some unpaid work for former President, David Granger, he was informed by ExxonMobil and a government official in separate interviews that ExxonMobil’s local subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL), had intended to flare all the gas. Dr. Mangal said that later on, the government official communicated to him that the decision had been changed; that the company would re-inject the gas. This was one month after the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) was inked by then Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman.

EEPGL Government and Public Affairs Advisor, Janelle Persaud.

Former Presidential Advisor on Petroleum, Dr. Jan Mangal.

“I asked the government official and he said they were going to flare the gas,” Dr. Mangal said, of a 2016 interview. “I tried to convince him that we couldn’t flare. The next day we interviewed ExxonMobil and they said the same thing, they were planning to flare all the gas. I said that should not happen. At the end of the week, in our closeout session with the same official, I asked him the same question about flaring, and he said they had changed their decision and would now re-inject the gas.
The Liza Destiny Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) ended up being designed to re-inject the gas. EEPGL Government and Public Affairs Advisor, Janelle Persaud, iterated that much when Kaieteur News contacted her for a comment.“The Liza Phase One project is designed to eliminate routine flaring of produced gas by using the gas to power the floating production, storage and offloading vessel and by re-injecting gas into the reservoir to conserve the gas and to improve oil recovery, thereby reducing emissions compared with traditional methods,” the EEPGL representative said. However, she did not answer the question of whether it is true that ExxonMobil Guyana had initially intended to flare all the gas.
Dr. Mangal said that what happened in 2016 indicated to him that “the Government of Guyana was not doing any work on its own and was only following what ExxonMobil told them to do.”
ExxonMobil has been producing oil at Liza Phase One for about 14 months, and has been flaring for 13 of them, due to equipment defects. While Guyana awaits the reinstatement of the repaired gas compression equipment, which would reduce flaring to pilot levels, the company’s daily flaring rate is 16 million cubic feet per day, according to Country President, Alistair Routledge.
Routledge told reporters during a February 8 press engagement that the current state of affairs is not where the company wants to be.
“We go to bed worrying about it,” he had said.
However, Routledge sought to convince the media that the flaring currently occurring is not producing extreme emissions.
“But just to put it in context,” he had said, “the Kingston power plant has higher emissions than the flare we’re talking about. So, this isn’t extreme emissions.”
“In oil and gas operations,” the ExxonMobil official continued, “a flare is a necessary safety system, and over the life of an asset, there are periods where you need to flare. It is part of transitions of startup, shutdown. That’s what the facilities are designed for. But clearly, we do not want to have extended flaring of any significance.”
Head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Sharifah Razack, has not responded to an email request sent more than three weeks ago, for the most recent statistics on the volume of gas flared. ExxonMobil did not provide the figures either when asked, but told the press to do its own calculations.
This newspaper’s calculations, which take previous EPA reports into consideration, indicate that to date, EEPGL has flared more than 13 billion cubic feet of gas per day.