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May 19, 2021 News
By Gary Eleazar
Kaieteur News – The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week Monday, amended the Liza I permit for the operations in the Stabroek Block, led by ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) to impose fines for flaring but the country lacks any expertise to calculate those penalties according the former Director of the Agency.
Former EPA Director, Dr. Vincent Adams, during an online discussion with stakeholders on the new penalties, lamented the state of affairs that the country has tied itself into, arguing that it would be left up to ExxonMobil—the company for which the fine is put in place—to decide on the amount to be paid, should there be an infraction exceeding the allowable flaring cap beyond the permitted timeline.
Adams was adamant that ExxonMobil is in fact the party that influenced the provisions of the new Liza permit, in order to protect the company. He explained, saying, “Here is why I know Exxon [Mobil] had a lot of input here,” and pointed to the fine to be placed on every tonne of, “carbon dioxide equivalent” flared and suggested “it’s not just an easy calculation, it can become very complicated.”
According to Dr. Adams—also a former senior technical expert with British Petroleum Oil Company—the calculations involved require the input of several different parameters and assumptions in the calculations.
“It’s not just the gas,” he said, “we measure the gas, we know you’ve got X number of cubic feet that is emitted per day but this here, you got to convert that now.”
Explaining the process, he pointed to the fact that among other considerations in the calculation would be the chemical composition of the gases, at the time of the infraction: “You’ve [then] got to recalculate it back and then you got to go to all kinds of references to get some parameters to input into that equation. So there is a wide variety of methods that you can use that can give you totally different calculations.”
Dr. Adams added that compounding the hurdle of various applicable equations yielding different figures for the fines to be paid was the absence of capacity in the EPA to conduct the calculations.
“I know for sure,” he stated, “that there is nobody on our staff that is going to be able to do that maneuvering, or understand how to do it, to calculate this fine.”
As such, he posited, “guess who is going to calculate this fine, who is going to manage it, who is going to report on it, it’s going to be Exxon, so Exxon is going to determine, what equations to use, whatever to use to determine how much you know, this carbon dioxide equivalency and so they are going to determine.”
Dr. Adams was adamant, “that’s the way I see it, until I see anything different.”
He stated that, “…one of the things that I said must be done, is that in that permit, it should state what method is going to be used to calculate that carbon dioxide equivalent.”
Further criticising the amended permit, Dr. Adams had said the new provision in fact legalises a 14 billion cubic feet flaring cap to essentially allow the company to not pay any fines retroactively.
This, since the 60-day grace period given to ExxonMobil to allow for permissible flaring under emergencies and such other circumstances, is also tantamount to giving the company permission to flare.
“They (ExxonMobil) were on record that flaring would be stopped from day one,” he observed, “they put in the equipment and it’s not working, and they have been flaring for two years now and we are accommodating them, bending over backwards and rewriting the permit now.”
He was adamant in his lamentations over the EPA’s decision to “give them 60 days of flaring, when international standards such as in the US, only gives two days, 48 hours” but “we giving them 60 days.”
He expounded further, “Here is the con in all of this, or the shiny object to distract from what they are doing, from the violation of law – now we are going to charge them US$30 for every tonne of carbon equivalent over and above the 60 days, that 60 days.”
According to Dr. Adams, “if Exxon can’t stop flaring within 60 days, something is wrong, [and] they probably don’t need to be operating, to be quite honest.”
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