Liza versus Macondo – a high risk for Guyana

Nov 05, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – I refer to your article ‘Govt. working to secure about US$2B from Exxon instead of full coverage insurance’ 02 November 2021. The Liza, Payara and Yellowtail oil wells are around 18,000 feet deep in the rocks and under 5-6,000 feet of Atlantic water. BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was about the same depth in the rocks and under the same depth of water. So the physical difficulty of controlling and stopping an oil spill in the Liza/Payara/Yellowtail wells is likely to be about the same as for Macondo, reckoning positively that Exxon will have learned from the Macondo disaster but negatively that Macondo was only 40 miles off the Louisiana coast with a vast array of industrial resources while Liza wells are more than three times that distance offshore and we have no relevant industrial support base for oil spill control.
Macondo took 86 days to control. The direct cost to BP was over US$60B, thirty times more than the US$2B that our Government is negotiating for. Please, negotiators for Guyana, put new batteries in your calculators. We want to see Exxon carrying full comprehensive insurance cover, not a token.

Yours truly,
Janette Bulkan

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