Guyana: the great career builder for oilmen

Aug 23, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Want to bet big on oil?  Guyana was the place to be.  Wishing for a rocket fuel boost to career in oil?  Guyana was the big elephant that had to be stalked, with the dice rolled.  It was what worked out splendidly for Tim Chisholm of Hess Corp and Pablo Eisner of CNOOC.  As pathfinders, trailblazers go, Chisholm and Eisner are now hailed among the kings of the oil patch.  Chisolm (Chisum) itself is a name straight out of Texas legend about trail drovers and cattle drives, and cattle wars. Both the Chisolm of today and Pablo (the crude oil one) have etched their names in oil lore, and it is all because of Guyana. Guyana’s Stabroek Block, now a legend in its own time.  Whoever said fairytales are about nothing that resembles reality.  The only problem with Guyana’s oil fairytale is that Guyanese have now been forced to live with crass and cruel stepmothers (stepfathers and stepbrothers not excluded).

Chisolm aimed for what Americans call the big score and made a big career for himself when he persisted with the Stabroek Block now a proven bonanza of stupendous proportions, and the financial fun is only at the start of Round 1.  Guyana the Big Score, Guyana the big career builder; just don’t tell that to ordinary Guyanese between a rock (is the oil for real?) and a hard place (if it is, then what about a real share?).  Many have been the heads rolled in the oil world, sometimes for a mark missed by a whisker.  Years of patient exploration and study go down the drain.  The rare, good ones who are laboring in the lonely, often barren, oilfields have that instinct that turns out to be a killer.  It is called gut.  Neither science nor academic nor textbook, just a sense of smell that detects oil, when others see sand and seabed, have already thrown in the towel and headed off to better pastures.

Karl Twitchell was one who toiled for eternities in the empty spaces of the Middle East until he struck gold.  There was Michael Halbouty who was called the “greatest wildcatter of all time.”  He liked to boast of “14 straight discoveries followed by 36 straight dry holes.’  A man who lost two fabulous fortunes, then made a third.  It takes a rare kind of self-believer, risk taker and committed adventurer to live like that, always dangerously poised on a knife’s edge and loving it.  And, of course, the man who came before them all.  It was Col. Edwin Drake who struck pay dirt in Titusville, PA in 1865. They didn’t call him Crazy Drake for nothing, and that army rank was how he rewarded himself.  In summary, the late, great oilmen were a combination of geologists, eccentrics, mystics, with great, big-eyed oil optics.  Like any really good salesman, they believed in themselves more, less in their product.  Enter Chisholm, Tim Chisholm, not John Chisum.  If I may be tolerated the liberty, he became Guyana’s John Wayne.  Does he have a Guyana oil war story to tell or what?  There is the gusher that is the now fabled Stabroek Block.  Take it from me, Guyana’s Stabroek Block is the gift that keeps on giving, and Guyanese don’t know the half of it.  Legendary careers are erected on the back of such persistence, such perspicacity that senses what all other men could not see, and such dogged prowess that stays the course, then comes up with the giant motherlode.  Is the Stabroek Block, one vast oil basin, one unending oil bonanza or what?  But for whom, I have the insensitivity, incivility, to inquire.

Tim Chisolm and Pablo Eisner now stand as men of awesome proportions among oilmen.  Their trajectory is known, their course set.  What about Guyana and Guyanese, where that stuff of fables, the Stabroek oil kingdom reigns in unequalled, unchallengeable, and unbelievable underwater splendor?  Pardon me for envisioning an international career for Guyana as a country that commands respect, because it is more than rich.  Because it is wise.  But before that, brawny, courageous, and resourceful enough at leadership heights to stand, fight.  Should I not be excused for harbouring ideas that every Guyanese man, woman, and child can look forward to a career of comfort and contentment?  Chisolm and Eisner found the oil, and they are the toast of their times.  Guyana and Guyanese own this same oil, but both have been toasted black and blue, so battered and brutalized they have been for their own inheritance.  Chisolm and Eisner, Routledge and Woods and the Chinese and Dutch and Japanese, have all collected high recognition and handsome rewards from Guyana’s Stabroek Block.  Why not the same for Guyanese from the last and unchanging will and testament of their oil bequest?  The foreign capital investors and local political operators (I call most of them deceivers and exploitative predators) grab their share of Guyana’s Stabroek patrimony.  What about the prosperity, that kind now and later destiny, that is due every single Guyanese?

The richest people in the world cannot be so crippled by something as ordinary as cost-of-living that they flee this country.  What kind of career for the richest global citizens: vacuuming floors, babysitting the children, and giving care to the elderly and sickly of foreigners?  The same ones who are here and in the thick of rich oil careers.  I am delighted for Chisolm and Eisner.  They have earned their places.  I would be more delighted when Ali and Jagdeo work their butts off, fight an honest fight, for Guyanese to get their rich, rightful share and take their rightful place among the first citizens of the world.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• CNOOC, Guyana, Hess Corp, Pablo Eisner, Tim Chisholm

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