According to Pedro Haas, Director of Advisory Services at Hartree Partners who was tasked with carrying out a feasibility study for an oil refinery in Guyana, the cost to construct such a facility would be some US$5 billion, and would see at least half the invested amount lost upon commissioning.
Presenting the findings of the study last evening at the Marian Academy auditorium to a few hundred attendees, Haas explained that building an oil refinery would be a very risky investment which would require a vast amount of capital. The refinery question has arisen in light of ExxonMobil’s plans to begin pumping oil from its Liza well around 2020.
Haas explained that when calculating the cost to build refineries, the industry’s jargon represents it as a cash amount per barrel of oil. “For many years, refinery cost to build was about US$10,000 to a barrel and then it changed and rose to about US$20,000 and about today it could be up to