Vice President Jagdeo recently added some clarity regarding the long-term vision of the PPP/C administration. This clarification came at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Texas. The first vision pertains to the immediate maximising of oil revenues because of the uncertain prospects for fossil fuel in the coming three decades. The second vision has to…
A vigorous debate is ongoing regarding the operationalisation of the Natural Resource Fund (NRF). In his last Stabroek News column, Mr Christopher Ram cites legal reasons why the NRF Act is not in operation. He also raises the possibility that the government may not want to operationalise the existing Act since it was passed in…
Several observers have noted that the account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York does not constitute the National Resource Fund (NRF). The account in the Federal Reserve is merely holding the oil revenues – at almost zero percent yield – until the Guyana government operationalises the NRF (hereafter “the Fund”). Operationalisation of the…
Today’s column explores the proposed gas-to-shore project. Off the bat, I must declare that converting the present heavy fuel power plants to natural gas makes sense. Indeed, in June 2015, I wrote a column, then under Development Watch, arguing for the transition from high-polluting heavy fuel to less-polluting natural gas power plants. However, the same…
ExxonMobil and its affiliates hit the jackpot in their offshore oil exploration with the Liza-1 well discovery in the Stabroek Block in Guyana in May 2015. Multiple oil discoveries since then have unleashed the business optimism of onshore service providers and elicited significant excitement amongst the Guyanese public. Now boasting some of the highest per capita proven…
Please allow me to comment on your article in yesterday’s SN: `Guyana’s first million barrels of oil is closer – still no word on price.’ Once one peels away the legal mumbo jumbo and pretensions, the oil contract clearly says that profit oil is valued by the monthly average of the spot market price. You…
I have written over ten columns on the foreign exchange (FX) market since 2009. These essays are direct in the sense that they address explicitly the question of what is determining the exchange rate and the quantity traded in the local market. In 2017, I wrote a six-part series to address some of the issues…
If we want to say something about the future state of an event, we have to account for the initial conditions. Given that we live in a complex world, the outcomes often depend on the initial conditions. It is possible that one initial condition could produce multiple outcomes, making the task of prediction fraught with…
There have been several lofty predictions of gross revenues that the Guyana government is likely to receive. For example, Rystad Energy recently announced that the government will earn over US$100 billion in oil revenues from the Stabroek block alone. However, it is important to note that the gross oil revenue the government is expected to…
