Guyana in talks with Middle Eastern oil companies ahead of offshore bidding round

Guyanese Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo said during the International Energy Conference and Exhibition (IECE) last week that Georgetown was currently in talks with several state-run Middle Eastern oil firms about a potential exploration for new offshore oil deposits.

Jagdeo declined to name any of the companies involved in the talks, but he told Reuters in an interview that Guyana was taking this approach as part of a wider effort to diversify the pool of investors working in its oil industry. He also confirmed that if Guyana were to move forward with these Middle Eastern firms, it might bar groups led by ExxonMobil (US) from the licensing round that is scheduled to take place in the third quarter of this year.

“I’m not sure whether we would want Exxon to participate” in the bidding for unassigned offshore sites, Jagdeo informed the news agency. “We haven’t made a decision. But they have a fairly large footprint here already.”

Currently, ExxonMobil and its partners are producing all of the country’s oil. They were the first to discover crude in the offshore zone in 2015 and the first to bring the Liza-1 and Liza-2 fields on stream at the Stabroek block in December 2019 and February 2022 respectively. (In fact, they were the only firm to report a commercially viable find in the Guyanese offshore zone until the beginning of this month, when CGX Energy and Frontera Energy, both of Canada, said they had discovered crude in Kawa-1, an exploration well drilled at the Corentyne block.)

The vice-president did acknowledge ExxonMobil’s success in bringing Stabroek into production just a few short years after making its first discovery. If the US super-major could develop the unassigned blocks equally quickly, he said, Guyana’s government might reconsider its position and allow it to bid in the auctions. He stressed, though, that diversification would be important for Guyana’s oil industry going forward.

According to Reuters, the list of attendees at the IECE event last week included representatives of QatarEnergy and a six-person delegation from the Saudi government. The news agency also quoted a source close to the matter as saying that Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC), a state-owned Indian company, had expressed interest in participating in Guyana’s offshore bidding round.

The source did not say whether ONGC was eyeing any particular blocks in the offshore zone.