Oil and Gas – ChrisRam.net

January 30, 2019January 31, 2019

Mr Davis wrongly stated that gov’t take from oil contract is 60%

Stabroek News letter writer Mr. Patrick Davis `We must be clear-eyed about how detrimental tearing up contracts could be’ (Sunday Stabroek, January 27) attempts to disparage Dr. Jan Mangal, accusing him of “confusing and disingenuous claims about economic development, business sector stability, and the terms of our current oil contracts”. Mr. Davis is of course free to entertain as valid and good for his economic development the neoliberal view that we must open our arms and our Treasury to foreign investors demanding generous concessions and favourable conditions while paying remuneration to locals they would not dare to pay in their home countries. What he is not free to do is use the public space to distort the oil contracts and their consequences to the patrimony and wellbeing of our country or to recklessly seek to accuse others.

Mr. Davis states that “there is little to suggest that the contract we signed in 2016 is ‘unfair’. He then claims, boldly but wrongly, that the “government take … [is] approximately 60 per cent” and that “is by all accounts on par with other frontier countries that were untested territory prior to discovery.” How much more uninformed someone can be is hard to imagine, unless that someone has just arrived from Mars or beyond and has missed all the discussions, debates, columns and letters on the Oil Contract which had been kept hidden for eighteen months.

December 21, 2018December 29, 2018

Every Man, Woman and Child Must Become Oil-Minded (Part 67)

Introduction

“You couldn’t do the math”, said Ambassador Perry Holloway in his interview with reporters published in Stabroek News last Tuesday December 9, 2018 as he exhorted us Guyanese to educate ourselves about the fortune coming our way from ExxonMobil’s oil. Let us allow the man the slack to exult that it was under his watch that a giant American company discovered some of the largest oil finds in the past ten years; that the 2016 Petroleum Agreement signed by the APNU+ AFC gave to the Americans in Guyana’s Maritime Zone an even better version of China’s Belt and Road Plan without even one Dollar or Yuan given by the US Government in loan or grant to the people of Guyana.

But we need to draw the line when exultation turns to condescension and Guyanese are told they cannot count, or as the departed Ambassador said, “do the math.” Well, I have news for the Ambassador: it is he who cannot count and who appears to be uninformed about the terms of the 2016 Agreement.

It is more than a joke that English was too hard and so the Americans created American “English”. Now it seems their math is poor as well, even as their Ambassador criticises us. But we should not be too hard on the poor man as he is no different from the rest of his countrymen and women: America is not among the top twenty-five countries in the world in math and science.

December 14, 2018December 18, 2018

Every Man, Woman and Child Must Become Oil-Minded (Part 66)

Introduction

Mr. David Patterson, Minister of Public Infrastructure, offered a commendably prompt but strange response to last week’s column by way of his December 8 letter to the editor “The 2019 budgetary allocation has nothing to do with natural gas”. Strange because Mr. Patterson appears to have set out to contradict the statement in Column 65 that it was unclear how an ocean floor mapping exercised announced by him will cost and where it is provided for in the 2019 Budget. Having agreed that there is no budgetary allocation, in compliance with the Constitution, there can be no such activity in 2019.

But Mr. Patterson adds further confusion to the matter by seeking to deny that he spoke with Stabroek News regarding statements on any ocean floor mapping exercise, provoking a direct response from the editor of the Stabroek News that one of its reporters did in fact speak to Minister Patterson for the purposes of the article. It is surely very troubling that Mr. Patterson, a senior Minister, can be so careless and forgetful that he cannot recall a matter as significant as this.

December 7, 2018December 29, 2018

Every Man, Woman and Child Must Become Oil-Minded (Part 65)

Introduction

Today’s column carries out a commitment I made in a letter earlier this week responding to a statement by Mr. David Patterson, Minister of Public Infrastructure appearing in the last Sunday Stabroek. Patterson reports that a Dutch company will be undertaking an ocean floor mapping “as government prepares to bring natural gas onshore”.

In my response, I said that it was unclear how much this mapping will cost and where it is provided for in the Budget. After reviewing the 2019 Estimates, I noted that the closest such an activity came to being a project was described on page 467 of Volume 1 of the Estimates as an Energy Matrix Diversification Programme for which there is an allocation of $600 million for provision for studies and distribution infrastructure in the capital budget of the Ministry of Public Infrastructure.

I have since compared the 2019 Estimates with that of 2018 and it is interesting to note that the Project Code for the description is 2609800 which is a new Code and which therefore, did not appear in the 2018 Estimates.

November 23, 2018December 29, 2018

Every Man, Woman and Child in Guyana Must Become Oil-Minded (Part 64)

Introduction

Figures contained in the 2017 financial statements of Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited indicate that the three-party set up of Esso, Hess and CNOOC Nexen will spend well over five hundred billion dollars ($500,000,000,000) up to December 2019. The three companies signed a sweetheart deal with then Minister of Natural Resources Mr. Raphael Trotman one year after Esso’s parent ExxonMobil had announced the world’s largest oil find in 2015.

Put another way, if US$10 (approximately $2,100) of this sum is applied to every barrel of oil, it will require over two hundred and forty million barrels of oil before the full sum is recovered. On the more positive side, once these costs, which are recoverable costs under the 2016 Agreement, are recovered, only ongoing capital expenditure and operating costs will be charged to cost oil for the remaining 4 billion barrels of oil.