11B, 15B, or 18.7B, or much more

Jul 28, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana is sitting atop an offshore oil treasure house. The people exploring for and producing the oil have clammed up on how many new barrels of oil have been found in the last eight discoveries announced. The Guyanese in charge of the nation’s wealth is stricken with laryngitis: he flinches from efforts to speak, he can’t speak, he doesn’t want to speak, about this treasure. Guyana’s oil wealth has become a shame, something to conceal, like a dreadful venereal disease (syphilis), or a family secret (incest). Who then can tell Guyanese, give them an estimate, of what their inheritance represents, how much treasure they have?

It is a joke to start with ExxonMobil’s Country Chief, Alistair Routledge and Guyana’s oil heavyweight, Bharrat Jagdeo. Both men have fastened themselves to 11B barrels of oil as the total known reserves. The picture of dogs trapped in mating season should be appropriate. Round and round and barely moving are the extents of what Guyanese see and hear, with 11B barrels of oil as the anchor that weighs down. Never have men been so close to such massive wealth, and never have they been so secretive, fearful, about how much of it there is. Reports of discoveries and the estimated amounts of new oil used to come fast and furious, then something mysterious happened, has become the standard. Since April 2022, discoveries have been announced, eight in all, and that was all. At some level, somebody with the power in their hands, and knowledge in their heads, decided that a usual companion piece of information would be held back. Held back means left out, which means kept secret. Eight new discoveries in 27 months, and the people who own the oil wealth are kept in the dark about whether it is a total of one billion barrels of new oil or four billion, or 7.7 billion, or more. Is it one of those numbers, or a number that is closer to twice (or thrice) the current stated total number of proven reserves, which is 11B?

To date, ExxonMobil’s Routledge has gone on a magic carpet ride. He floats around, beats about the bush, and ends up in the same place: appraisals take time, could be years. He wants Guyanese to believe that ExxonMobil is clueless of whether the last eight discoveries total one barrel of new oil is or one billion. But Guyana is a world class investment and the crown jewel in ExxonMobil’s tiara. There is someone somewhere in ExxonMobil who believes that Guyanese are dunces. The announcements of prior discoveries had their own sound, and it was all music. Words such as ‘exciting’ and ‘worldclass’ were among the choice expressions uttered by the ExxonMobil-led consortium. Since April 2022, the music stopped, and a blanket of silence blocks the sight of citizens. Guyana’s leading oilman, Jagdeo, goes as ExxonMobil goes. When Routledge solemnly speaks about appraisals, so does Jagdeo. When the Country Head pushes ahead with monetization of proven oil assets, Jagdeo is right behind like a parrot echoing the same monetization of assets in hand. It is unacceptable and nothing but a slur for ExxonMobil and Routledge to think that Guyanese are fools, with this obscenity about appraisals, time, and monetization. When Guyana’s oil head Jagdeo tries his best for Guyanese to swallow ExxonMobil’s cock-and-bull story about appraisals and monetization, he transforms himself into a puppy trained to react without hesitation, with blind devotion, to whatever the master commands.

A comrade of Jagdeo’s, a former Guyana Minister of Finance, a former Deputy Governor of Jamaica’s Central Bank, did his own assessment, made his own judgment: 4B barrels more for a total of 15B. Two months ago, a three-member team attached to S&P Global Inc., a highly reputable analytics entity, came up with 7.7B barrels of new oil to bring the total reserves to 18.7B. Earlier, CNOOC, the third member of the ExxonMobil consortium did its own calculation and reached 746M new barrels from one discovery only. ExxonMobil and Jagdeo stick to 11B. Somebody is withholding need-to-know new oil discovery information. Jagdeo came up with the senseless: it is substantial but not significant. It could be Guyana’s oil wisdom, or a puppet parroting ExxonMobil’s slickness.

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Bharrat Jagdeo, disease, Editorial, Guyanese, syphilis

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