Jagdeo depending on Exxon cable to verify oil production

Aug 08, 2023 News

Kaieteur News – The Government of Guyana (GoG), after establishing the regulatory framework for the country’s rapidly developing petroleum sector, will construct a state-of-the-art operations center that will be fed information from ExxonMobil to verify oil production data.

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo

This is according to the Vice President (VP) Bharrat Jagdeo. On Thursday during a press conference at Freedom House he told reporters that government plans to access the data that Exxon will be receiving at its new Headquarters at Ogle, East Coast Demerara (ECD) while in the meantime, remote monitoring to verify oil production data will be applied.

The VP said, “We will get past the core reforms first…the PSA (Production Sharing Agreement), the Local Content Act, the auction, the Petroleum Activities Bill; when we have upgraded the architecture we will then move to operation (and) compliance issues.”

The former Head of State was keen to note that the new PSA will strengthen the government’s ability to manage the industry, since it would force oil and gas companies to produce pertinent data. Likewise, the new oil law that is expected to be passed by September will ensure petroleum companies submit timely data. According to the VP, this would give the regulators “a better real-time picture of the industry”.

While government is aiming to utilize data from the company to verify production data, this move could deprive the nation an opportunity to independently confirm the number of barrels being produced offshore daily. This means, Guyana would be blindly accepting the production rates which could be grossly understated by the oil companies.

Nevertheless, the Vice President explained, “On issues relating to production verification, we said that Exxon is building an operational center as part of the head office. They are gonna have a fiber optic cable coming in, we may have to get an access to the fiber or in the short term we will probably use satellite technology to have an independent measuring of the flows and everything else.”

Jagdeo added that the use of this technology would verify the discharge waters and oil flows, along with other relevant data related to production on the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessels.

This position was first announced by the Vice President in May this year while responding to a question from Kaieteur News.

Back then, he said, “I admitted that last time that because our focus has been on the framework, the next wave of the attention of the ministry and the government will be on building greater monitoring capability.”

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