I have just read an interesting account of Cost Recovery as provided for by the Profit Sharing Agreement between GoG and the Oil Company. (KN Feb. 10th, Pre-contract cost… US$460M seem to have been pulled from an alternate universe – Nigel Hinds). It appears every penny incurred by the Oil Company – including interest cost…
In the previous column we explored the possibility of Guyana becoming a petro state overnight. A petro state is one in which most government revenue comes from oil royalties and profit share. The government is then tasked with spending and distributing these funds among competing interests. The last column was sceptical about the Guyanese state’s…
Although Guyana is expected to become an oil producer, energy expert Dr. Vincent Adams says agriculture and renewable energy will actually be its keys to long-term sustainability. Adams told Sunday Stabroek that this will be what he will be telling not only government but Guyana’s citizenry when he returns this year, after serving in several…
The second part in this series addressed the question of how much money Guyana will likely receive. It is generally known today that the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) is quite favourable toward ExxonMobil. We tried to understand this within the context of the Anglo-American corporate governance framework, which sees a corporation as having the sole…
With billions already gained on the stock market from its oil find here, ExxonMobil and its partners can “more than afford” to pay Guyana US$1 billion instead of the US$18 million received as a signing bonus, according to energy expert Dr Vincent Adams, who also strongly believes that the government should go back to the…
The previous essay established the developmental context under which we address the essential question of this series: could Guyana escape the natural resource curse? The best measure we have of development is perhaps the Human Development Index (HDI) and its iterations such as the Gender Development Index and inequality-adjusted HDI. At a minimum, escaping the…
By now many Guyanese are pondering the important concept known as the natural resource curse. Government ministers, high-paid government consultants and some news outlets have been talking about it since the discovery of high-quality crude oil in Guyana’s offshore waters. As early as 1995, the concept was first observed statistically by development economists and researchers…
Late last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Brazil received US$1.88 billion in signing bonuses for six exploration blocks during a process of competitive auctioning. Chad in 2001 received US$25 million in a signing bonus for sour crude oil with lower viscosity compared with Guyana’s high quality sweet crude. Signing bonuses are also paid…
A contract was signed in June 2016 between the coalition government, ExxonMobil and its partners in the Stabroek block. Why did this contract dealing with the exploitation of the nation’s natural resources remain a secret for over a year? This does not augur well for the future transparency of the oil industry. In Article 15…
There is a joke that you may have heard in some accounting classes. During an interview, prospective candidates were asked what was 2+2. The engineer answered 4, the journalist 4, and the lawyer 4. The accountant leaned over and whispered, “I can make it any number you want”. There is a great point behind this…
