‘Exxon cannot be trusted to supply Guyana with oil production data’

Oct 02, 2023 News

…OGGN urges independent monitoring

Kaieteur News – As Guyana prepares to hand ExxonMobil a sixth Permit to conduct oil production offshore in the Stabroek Block, the country is yet to put measures in place to independently monitor the activities.

This means that the country is presently dependent on the operator to share the daily number of barrels produced and other relative data such as gas and water production.

Stakeholders have expressed their dissatisfaction over this state of affairs, given that Guyana is now nearing is fourth anniversary since oil production commenced.

The Oil and Gas Governance Network (OGGN) during its weekly broadcast on Kaieteur Radio (99.1/ 99.5 FM) delved into the importance of independent monitoring on Friday evening, urging the Government of Guyana (GoG) that it cannot trust the developer of the Stabroek Block to supply accurate data.

The programme was moderated by Charles Sugrim while panelists, Director of OGGN, and former Science teacher, Alfred Bhulai and President of the Transparency Institute Guyana Inc (TIGI), Frederick Collins shared their perspective on the issue.

Bhulai started off the conversation by intimating the need for monitoring of the operations 24/7. He said this should be done by competent individuals contracted by the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Members of OGGN during a recent programme discussing the need for independent monitoring of Guyana’s oil production. (From left: Host, Charles Sugrim and panelists Alfred Bhulai and Frederick Collins.

Meanwhile, Collins shared the view that while some may believe few companies in the extractive industry dodges transparency, his conclusion is that none of them are interested in doing business transparently. He said it did not matter if the company was involved in gold, petroleum, uranium or any other extractive sector.

“When you have this type of extremism going on in terms of unfairness, nobody wants to be transparent, they want to keep it a secret as (far as) possible. So when we are talking about Exxon, don’t expect with their track record they are going to be any more transparent and they have had decades of practicing the finer arts of eclipsing information,” the President of the watchdog body cautioned.

He therefore insisted that Guyana moves urgently to conduct its own monitoring of the petroleum production activities.

During a press conference last month, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo said Guyana will soon move to invite tenders in search of a suitable company to conduct monitoring of the oil and gas activities.

“The next step is to go out to tender and request a proposal for a company to track production on a daily basis,” he said.

Jagdeo had previously announced that government will construct a state-of-the-art operations center that will be fed information from the oil company to verify oil production data.

The VP had said, “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.”

Citizens had voiced concerns over this move, arguing that it could deprive the nation an opportunity to confirm the data being supplied by the oil giant. This means, Guyana could have settled for blindly accepting the production rates which could be grossly understated by the oil companies.

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Independent, Monitoring, OGGN, oil, transparent

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