Newly appointed Minister of National Resources, Raphael Trotman has told Stabroek Business that while the 2015 announcement that ExxonMobil has discovered significant deposits of oil offshore Guyana could transform the country’s economy, he still believes that the country’s short to medium term energy ‘salvation’ lay in hydropower.
Government, Trotman said in a recent interview, continued to keep in focus the country’s prospects for successfully exploiting its hydropower potential despite a May 20, 2015 announcement by ExxonMobil Corporation that its affiliate Esso Exploration & Production Guyana Ltd. had made a significant oil find on the Stabroek Block offshore Guyana.
And according to Trotman it was “a paradox” that the country’s oil find had coincided with its pursuit of “clean energy” options. “Even as we continue to factor in our oil find to the longer term development of the country’s economy we want to ensure that we strengthen our credentials for clean energy. The important thing is that we resist the temptation to set aside our environmental credentials even as we pursue our oil resources. We must resist the temptation to go overboard,” Trotman told Stabroek Business.
The Natural Resources Minister dismissed the prospects of any immediate-term economic returns from the country’s oil find. “It takes 5-8 years to develop a well. Part of the exercise involves the running of lines down 5,000 feet of water…and then further,” he said, though he unequivocally declared that oil was likely to materialise in Guyana “within the next ten years”. Trotman said that while current low global oil prices provide a lesser incentive to pursue oil exploitation, that “upside” was that it is now cheaper to mobilise the equipment associated with accessing the resource.
Meanwhile, according to Trotman, there has been no shortage of initiatives on the part of government including both bilateral and multilateral collaborative ones to create an infrastructure to support an oil industry. Guyana, Trotman told Stabroek Business was working with the United Nations, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the United States and Canada to build capacity while Exxon was also supporting the government in the area of environmental readiness. Work was also being done to transform the technical faculty of the University of Guyana in order to better position it to play a role in training.
Trotman, meanwhile, has not ruled in the likelihood of support from Guyana’s oil-rich Caribbean Community (CARICOM) neighbour, Trinidad and Tobago in the country’s quest to exploit its oil find though he declined to go any further than declaring that Port of Spain was “in touch with us.”
Government has already pronounced publicly on its intention to infuse the virtues of transparency and accountability into managing the returns from the country’s oil industry and last week Trotman told Stabroek Business that the APNU+AFC administration wants to be transparent in the manner in which resources are managed. “For minerals as a whole we are looking at the possibility of half-yearly production reports even if it gives rise to the possibility that those reports will come under scrutiny. The point is that we want people to become accustomed to transparency and openness,” Trotman added
