Page 10 - LatAmOil Week 04 2020

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Guyana to begin seeking marketing agent
The government of Guyana is reportedly planning to begin searching next month for an oil company or trading firm that will market its share of crude production.
“We don’t yet have the kind of back office support that is necessary” to handle this task without assistance, the director of the South American country’s Department of Energy, Mark Bynoe, told Reuters. “We’re moving to this simpler methodology to be able to ensure that as we build out, we are not losing value.”
Bynoe said that Guyanese authorities intended to begin this process soon. In Febru- ary, he said, Georgetown will ask international oil companies (IOCs) and energy trading firms to draw up and submit proposals.
Guyana’s government is contracted to take a percentage of the crude from the offshore Stabroek block, which a consortium led by the US major ExxonMobil brought on stream in December. Initially, it sold its share of the crude via open-market tenders, saying this was the best option because the country has no domes- tic refining capacity. The first cargo was sold to Royal Dutch Shell.
Going forward, Bynoe said, Georgetown will work with a trading firm to sell its oil to export markets. He noted, though, that the government would not necessarily choose an agent prior to national elections on March 2.
Guyana is one of Latin America’s poorest countries, and it has no experience of oil pro- duction to date. Yet it has seen its fortunes turn around since 1999, when it began assigning
exploration blocks to ExxonMobil and other IOCs.
ExxonMobil is currently working together with China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) and the US independent Hess to develop Stabroek. The partners have made 15 discoveries at the block so far and expect to be producing 750,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil there by 2025. Earlier this week, they raised their estimate of the licence area’s reserves from 6bn barrels of oil equivalent (boe) to more than 8bn boe.
Other firms including Spain’s Repsol and France’s Total are also exploring Guyana’s off- shore zone. So far, however, they have not made any commercial discoveries. ™
PGS completes 3D seismic survey of Corentyne block offshore Guyana
Canada’s CGX Energy said last week that its contractor had completed a 3D seismic pro- gramme at Corentyne, a prospective oil block located offshore Guyana.
In a statement, CGX confirmed that Petro- leum Geo-Services (PGS) of Norway had finished its survey of the northern section of Corentyne in the fourth quarter of 2019. PGS has collected about 582 square km of seismic data and will process the results of its survey in the first half of 2020, it said.
The seismic programme will help CGX and its partner Frontera Energy (Canada) gain a greater understanding of the Corentyne block’s
geology, the statement said. In turn, this knowl- edge will facilitate the identification of new exploration prospects and the de-risking of tar- get areas, it added.
According to Frontera, the partners have now succeeded in collecting high-quality 3D seismic data from Corentyne and Demerara, another block offshore Guyana. They are now on track to select one drilling site at each block in the second half of 2020, the company said. (CGX is expected to make the selection for Demerara on its own, as it is the sole share- holder in the block.)
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So far, 16 discoveries have been made at Stabroek (Image: ExxonMobil)
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w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 04 30•January•2020