Introduction
Two weeks ago in Toronto Canada, the organisation Caribbean Council of the Americas (CCA) in a public advertisement invited the Guyanese community and “other interested parties in the greater Toronto area to learn about all and gas exploration and development in Guyana.” The advertisement announced that the session would include an overview of ExxonMobil‘s recent exploration and operations.
The CCA, a membership organisation, describes itself as the principal private sector link between Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean with the primary objective to stimulate the expansion of Canadian commercial interests in the markets of the countries of the region. Its website notes that it strives to maintain a position at the centre of the issues that affect Canadian hemispheric trade and investment by hosting organising symposia on critical issues and advocating on major policy issues on behalf of our members.
Working in close collaboration with the Canadian Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD), and with Provincial Governments, the CCA organises outreach business activities for Heads of State, Ministers and business leaders from throughout the Americas.
Punctual Guyanese abroad
Of the roughly four hundred and fifty persons who had registered for the event, over four hundred showed up. Atypically, as early as twenty minutes before the scheduled starting time, the hall was 3/4 full which says a lot about the seriousness with which Guyanese observe time once they leave our muddy shores!
The audience soon discovered that the CCA’s advertisement was not wrong but it sure was misleading. For all practical purposes the activity was an all Exxon affair. My report is that the two presenters were both folks from Exxon, one a senior VP named Michael Cousins and the other a Guyanese who had only come out of College a couple of years back with a bachelor’s degree. My report is that the presentation was not of a very high or informative standard and was punctuated by an old video lasting about five minutes.
The presenters noted that Exxon has had a 87% “success rate” compared to 10% for a typical frontier country; that Liza-1 will have 120,000 barrels/day ‘everyday’ while Liza-2 will have 220,000 barrels/day sometime around April 2022, and that by 2025 production will climb to 750,000 barrels/day. They also announced that Exxon, HESS and CNOOC/NEXEN are currently employing 1,357 Guyanese.
The Guyana press
The Guyana press came in for some not so honourable mention and, seeking to defend the fairy tale contract which Trotman gave ExxonMobil in 2016, one of the presenters claimed wrongly that the Agreement was similar to a contract awarded by Australia, showing a slide to illustrate that the 2016 Agreement was normal for a ‘Frontier’ country, a term used with recurring frequency during the presentation.
Sticking to the adage not to allow facts to spoil a good story, the presenter failed to mention that the 2016 Agreement is a post-discovery Agreement while the contracts by the frontier countries were all pre-discovery contracts. Cousins got a bit testy when a member of the audience challenged him about his label even after it has been announced that about six billion barrels had been established in a single area.
Seeking to pre-but another major criticism of the Trotman’s Agreement, Cousins loosely and glibly announced that Brazil had an oil contract that was never renegotiated and took the Granger line about “the sanctity of contracts.” Reports are that Cousins was no more informed or convincing about the risks and contingencies in case of an oil spill and about the threats to the environment and the planet from the exploitation of non-renewable sources of energy.
My source tells me that it was obvious that the audience felt misled about the whole event and could not understand why the advertisement by the Caribbean Council of the Americas was not more accurate about the event. After all, CNOOC/NEXEN has Canadian connections and probably a more positive image than ExxonMobil and the influence of and partiality to ExxonMobil was obvious. This apparently had some impact on the audience as shown by their reaction to some of the questions being asked and answered. For those who have read about ExxonMobil’s role in misinformation on many things, the report is certainly not surprising or unexpected. We will just have to expect to deal with more of this.
Mark knew there was oil decades ago
And for this 75th. column a bit of levity from an interview given by Dr. Mark Bynoe to the United States Bloomberg Business News on August 13, 2019. The publication reports that Bynoe told them that when he was a boy, “he used to play cricket barefoot with friends in his village outside Georgetown. At the end of the day, his feet ‘would be shiny at the bottom’, and that ‘We knew oil was around’ ”.
Mark kept that secret for decades, never once hinting at it in any of the columns he wrote over many years as a contributor to Granger’s Guyana Review.
Next week: The hidden cost of oil to be borne by Guyana.