As ExxonMobil prepares for the arrival of its second exploration vessel, the Noble Tom Madden, Minister of State Joseph Harmon lobbied a visiting team of executives from the company to invest in the restoration of Georgetown.
“Personally, I believe that Georgetown can do with some help in terms of our physical environment, to the extent where we can bring Georgetown back to its pristine state. We need to recapture the clean-up spirit and emphasise and encourage solid waste management and such,” a press statement from the Ministry of the Presidency quotes the Minister as saying during a meeting held on Wednesday.
Since entering office in 2015, the APNU+AFC government has invested in excess of $700 million for the cleanup and restoration of the Capital City, and the City Administration, led by Town Clerk Royston King, had previously reached out to ExxonMobil in the hopes of securing funding for various projects.
There have been no reports on the progress of these attempts since January 2018.
Meanwhile, the Noble Tom Madden, which is set to arrive in Guyana next month, will focus primarily on the exploration of high potential areas and will commence drilling at the “Pluma” prospect, located approximately 17 miles (27 kilometeres) from Turbot well.
According to the statement, Harmon met with Executive Vice President of ExxonMobil Mike Cousins and Country Manager Rod Henson on Wednesday.
During the meeting, the Minister indicated that government welcomes the arrival of the new vessel and is extremely pleased at the success of the new oil find at the Hammerhead-1 Well, which was announced on August 30, 2018.
Hammerhead-1 is the ninth discovery announced by ExxonMobil on the Stabroek Block; it follows previous discoveries on the Stabroek Block at Liza, Liza Deep, Payara, Snoek, Turbot, Ranger, Pacora and Longtail.
Those prior discoveries led to the announcement of an estimated recoverable resource of more than four billion oil-equivalent barrels discovered to date, and the potential for up to five floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels producing more than 750,000 barrels per day by 2025.
The statement further noted that the minister placed on record government’s appreciation for the cooperation that currently exists between the Civil Defence Commission (CDC) and ExxonMobil and noted that there are various other environmental projects in which he would welcome the support of the company.
“I have seen the work done by the CDC through the company and I think we need to continue to strengthen these processes and redouble our efforts,” he said, even as he used the opportunity to thank the company for its sponsorship and support to the Guyana Amazon Warriors, which will today compete in the finals of the Caribbean Premier League.
Harmon also indicated that Guyana would welcome support and assistance to build and strengthen local capacity in technical areas related to the oil and gas sector.
“In the oil and gas sector, we want to look at the technical skills that can be absorbed. It is something we are paying attention to as a government. We are going to focus on our technical institutes and restructure them. It is an area in which we are going to focus heavily in the coming days. We need to re-equip them and expand them so that we can get back young people into the workforce and we would like assistance in this area. We currently have about 3,770 persons in the various technical institutes and it’s our intention to double or triple that number. We need to have about 10,000 young people enrolled in technical institutes. We have to ensure that our young people are prepared and can enjoy a better life. We need to help them and we are looking forwarded to continuing that cooperation,” he said.
Meanwhile, the statement explained that Cousins expressed appreciation for the ongoing partnership with the government and the country and reaffirmed his company’s commitment to working collaboratively in building capacity now and in the years to come.
