• Guyana, Latin America oil earnings will take a hit too
The international oil and gas industry, the life-blood of business and commerce globally has bowed to the impact of the dreaded Coronavirus by announcing earlier this week that it was calling off a number of its key networking events, including its various technical and academic meetings and resorting instead to virtual conferences, a decision which a Reuters report which appeared earlier this week said was taken in response to mounting concern about the virus and what the report said was now its “fast-growing toll”.
Listed among the key energy-related meetings that will now have to be set aside are a major energy conference planned by investment firm Scotia Howard Weil in New Orleans in late March which the report says may now go “virtual with speakers being required to make their presentations via webcast. Key players in the global oil and gas industry including the US firms Schlumberger and Occidental Petroleum Corporation were scheduled to participate in the conference which the Reuters report said offered a forum at which energy companies could discuss their respective financial performances for the first quarter of 2020 and their overall outlook.
What is clearly a drastic step by some of the key players in the global oil and gas community comes in the same week when Guyana announced its first case and death and Jamaica announced that it had detected its first imported case of the Coronavirus now being popularly referred to as COVID-19. Guyana’s death was that of a woman who had travelled from New York. The Jamaica patient has been identified as a Jamaican female who had travelled to the Caribbean island from Britain in March 4.
Latin America’s first reported case of COVID-19 surfaced in Brazil on February 26th. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) late last week named Guyana, Haiti, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala and Honduras as countries that are at high risk of vulnerability to the virus on account of their weak health systems.
PAHO has identified Guyana as one of several countries in the Americas that are at high risk of contracting the virus due to its weak health system, which, according to a PAHO official results in their inability to detect and manage cases at an early stage.
The CARICOM twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago has initiated what has been the most vigorous response to the deadly virus. Recently, health officials there placed nineteen countries on a list where travelers to Port of Spain will have to wait a minimum of fourteen days before entering the country.
It is, however, the scramble by the international oil majors to hastily adjust their schedules and set aside what would be considered to be priority meetings that has captured global attention. Here in the region the Society of Petroleum Engineers announced the COVID-19-related cancellation of its Latin American and Caribbean Petroleum Engineering Conference in Bogota, Colombia originally scheduled for March 17-19. Additionally, international oil companies and service providers are reportedly winding down plans for events planned around the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) annual meeting scheduled for March 22-24 though the planners say the meeting itself will still take place.
It is as much the economic impact of COVID-19 as its health repercussions that has spawned a condition of panic coupled with dire predictions among the big players in the global economy. There are already authoritative predictions that the spread of the virus across the globe is likely to result in a fall in demand for oil consumption globally in 2020 with the International Energy Agency (IEA) seeing global demand at 99.9 million barrels a day this year, down by approximately 90,000 barrels from 2019, and marking the first time since 2009 that oil consumption would have declined over a year.
Guyana, the new kid on the block on the international market is likely to experience reduced returns from its oil sales as a result of the decline in demand.
