No clarity from Govt. on Guyana’s actual oil reserves
Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo
One week later…
Kaieteur News – One week after Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat held a press conference to provide updates on the sector, the government is yet to clarify what is the actual figure of the country’s oil reserves.
Bharrat announced that the country’s reserve has moved up some 600M barrels putting the current reserves at 11.6B barrels. This disclosure comes two years and eight new discoveries after the last reserve update. It is important to note that earlier this year Exxon’s partner in the Stabroek Block China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) released its 2023 annual report which stated that the Lancetfish discovery has averaged some 100 million tons, which is equivalent to 746 million barrels of oil.
This publication has reached out to the minister on multiple occasions and he is yet to respond to inquiries, opting instead to read the messages and leave them there. Calls to the minister have also gone unanswered. Turning to chief policymaker in the sector, Vice President (VP) Bharat Jagdeo for clarity, but he said: “You had an opportunity there to deal with all these things…so let me just say on reserves. On the reserves we have…I told you that there is a submission that Exxon makes to us. The submission showed a minimal increase from the last quarter…”
Jagdeo went on to say: “we have gone out to contract someone to do an audit of these reserves. So we saw what Exxon submitted and we are going to do an audit of the reserves. So that we can get the full picture and this will be a technical audit by hiring consultants to do that. So the issue has come up we are addressing it all the other issues we will deal with at that level.”
The oil minister revealed last week that a contract was awarded to a French company to conduct an the of Guyana’s reservoir saying that, “ he said it is something that should have done a long time now, “but I’m happy that we’re going to start this soon.”
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Natural Resources issued Epression of Interest for “Consulting Services for Conducting Petroleum Resources and Reservoir Audit.” This process had initially attracted three proposals, Egyptian company Stratoil Energy Services, French company Beicip Franlab, and DeGolyer & Mac Naughton Corp (D&M) of Texas, USA.
The ministry’s advertisement stated that the Government of Guyana (GoG) has received financing in the amount of US$20 million from the World Bank (WB) towards the cost of the Guyana Petroleum Resources Governance and Management Project (GPRGMP) and intends to apply part of the proceeds to pay a consulting firm to provide advisory services, technical support and training and capacity strengthening services to the GoG.
