When Oil Value Moves: Lessons from Trinidad for Guyana’s Petroleum Future

Jul 05, 2026 News

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By Anthony Paul: Senior Energy and Strategy Advisor and former Director of Geology and Geophysics at the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Energy. 

ARTICLE 3

Should Guyana Create a Public Petroleum Register?

(Kaieteur News) – Public contracts are useful. But citizens also need a live record of licences, transfers, relinquishments, objections and decisions.

Guyana has already taken an important step by making several petroleum agreements publicly available.

That gives Guyana an advantage over Trinidad and Tobago, where contracts and many licence documents have long remained outside easy public view. Trinidad and Tobago’s own law required a petroleum register and Gazette notices for licence actions, but practice did not always live up to the law. Over time, citizens were left unable to easily track some of the country’s most important petroleum rights.

Guyana should not repeat that mistake.

Public contracts are important, but they are not enough. A contract tells citizens what was signed at a point in time. A public petroleum register tells citizens what is happening to petroleum rights over time.

That distinction matters.

Petroleum rights are not static. They are granted, renewed, extended, assigned, transferred, relinquished, surrendered, terminated, amended and sometimes disputed. Companies farm in. Companies farm out. Parent companies merge. Beneficial ownership changes. Costs are transferred. Acreage is returned. New terms are negotiated. Gas projects create new rights and obligations.

If citizens can see the original contract but cannot track these later events, transparency slowly becomes outdated.

That is why Guyana should consider creating a Public Petroleum Register with clear legal requirements.

Such a register should not be a public relations page. It should be a formal statutory record, maintained by the responsible ministry or an independent petroleum regulator, updated promptly, and backed by legal duties.

At minimum, it should record:

• all petroleum licences and agreements
  • the legal holder and beneficial owner of each interest
  • the location and coordinates of each block
  • dates of grant, renewal, extension, relinquishment and expiry
  • assignments, transfers, farm-ins and farm-outs
  • changes of control, including indirect parent-company transactions
  • approved work programmes and key obligations
  • relinquished acreage and data status
  • Gazette notices and dates of publication
  • objections, responses and final decisions
  • court decisions, arbitration awards or instruments affecting petroleum rights.

The register should also link to the relevant agreement, licence, amendment, approval notice and Gazette publication wherever confidentiality is not legally justified.

This is not radical. It is basic petroleum governance.

Trinidad and Tobago’s law already pointed in this direction. It required licence actions to be registered and certain notices to be published in the Gazette. That model recognised something important: petroleum rights are public rights granted to private parties. Citizens must be able to know when those rights are granted, changed or transferred.

Guyana can improve on that model.

It should not only publish notices. It should provide a clear, searchable, online petroleum register that ordinary citizens, journalists, civil society groups, companies, parliamentarians and local communities can use.

It should also consider whether certain decisions should allow objections or representations before final approval.

This matters especially for transfers, relinquishments, gas agreements and changes of control. Other licensees may have legitimate concerns. Communities may be affected. Civil society may identify gaps. Parliament may require explanation. The tax authority may need to assess whether value is being transferred. The regulator may need to consider whether the incoming party has sufficient technical and financial capacity.

A notice-and-objection system does not have to delay development unnecessarily. It can be time-limited, structured and focused. But it creates a discipline that secrecy destroys.

Before a major transfer is approved, the State should ask:

• who is selling?
  • who is buying?
  • who ultimately owns the buyer?
  • what value is being transferred?
  • has any premium been paid?
  • have costs already been recovered?
  • is any tax due?
  • does the incoming company have technical capacity?
  • does the transaction affect competition or future State leverage?
  • should citizens receive an explanation?

The same applies to relinquishments. When acreage is returned, citizens should know what has been relinquished, what data was acquired, whether discoveries were made, whether costs were recovered, and whether the acreage may be reoffered.

The same applies to Gas-to-Energy and future gas development.

If new licences, agreements, pipeline rights, gas supply terms, reimbursement arrangements or project documents are not public, Guyana risks creating a second petroleum system: one visible for oil contracts, another less visible for gas and infrastructure. That would be dangerous.

Secrecy often creeps in at the edges.

It does not always begin with a refusal to publish a major contract. Sometimes it begins with a project agreement, a side letter, a tariff, a pipeline arrangement, a gas sales term, a tax treatment, or a transfer approval that is treated as too technical for public debate.

This is how democratic accountability weakens.

Not always through open authoritarianism, but through the quiet narrowing of what citizens are allowed to know.

That is the risk of creeping autocracy in resource governance: decisions remain formally legal, but the public is slowly pushed outside the room.

Guyana should guard against that now.

A Public Petroleum Register would help.

It would not solve every problem. It would not replace strong regulators, capable tax auditors, independent experts, parliamentary scrutiny or responsible media. But it would give all of them a common factual base.

It would turn transparency from a one-time disclosure into a living system.

It would help citizens follow the movement of petroleum rights from award to exploration, discovery, development, production, transfer, relinquishment and renewal.

It would support the media and advocacy groups by giving them verified information rather than forcing them to rely on leaks, rumours or scattered announcements.

It would help investors too. Serious investors benefit from predictable, transparent systems. They know the rules, competitors know the rules, citizens know the rules, and governments are less exposed to suspicion.

The point is not to embarrass Government.

The point is to strengthen Government.

A minister or regulator who can point to a complete public register, a Gazette notice, a tax clearance certificate, a cost-recovery certification and a transparent approval process is in a stronger position than one who asks citizens simply to trust the system.

Trust is built through evidence.

Guyana still has time to build this properly.

The country should keep publishing petroleum agreements. But it should go further. It should create a statutory Public Petroleum Register, require Gazette notices for every material licence action, publish summaries of transfers and relinquishments, allow time-bound objections or representations where appropriate, and ensure that no petroleum value changes hands without a clear public record.

That is how Guyana can turn its transparency advantage into accountability.

That is how it can avoid the Trinidad and Tobago problem.

And that is how citizens can remain inside the room where their resources are being managed.

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• Guyana’s Petroleum Future, lessons, Oil Value

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