LatAmOil: Guyana to adopt new model for awarding oil contracts

Irfaan Ali, the president of Guyana, has announced plans to introduce a new model for assigning oil blocks to investors. He explained that his administration was moving away from direct negotiations with international oil companies (IOCs) and would instead conduct licensing rounds. The bidding contests will be open, public and transparent, with contracts awarded to the party that submits the “best offer,” he said.

“We have made it very clear that the process in awarding new oil blocks will be very much different,” he added.

Ali did not say when Georgetown might hold its first licensing round, but he indicated that the new model would soon start to be used.

In the meantime, he stated, government officials have begun preliminary discussions on the question of whether any licence areas would remain in state hands. “Discussions are still ongoing,” he said. “It calls for a lot of technical analysis on whether Guyana itself will retain some of those blocks for our own development and to manage by ourselves, but that is very preliminary.”