Former presidential advisor on petroleum Jan Mangal has expressed shock that ExxonMobil has flared over 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas offshore and said that he had insisted in 2018 that there be no flaring and that gas be brought to shore for electricity, fertilizer and other uses.
Believing that ExxonMobil flared the gas as a means of saving on revenue, Mangal also bemoaned that after finding oil since 2015, to date this country hasn’t the requisite oil and gas professionals in its employ and it is why he believes that the country is failing .
“ExxonMobil will take the cheapest path of least resistance. They planned to flare all the gas before I became involved in March 2017. I insisted on no flaring and that the gas be piped to shore for electricity and other uses (fertiliser, etc), Exxon agreed and created a pipeline project with a team in Houston,” he wrote yesterday on Facebook.
While natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel it does emit significant quantities of carbon dioxide and the current volume being flared can negatively impact this country’s emissions commitments.
Last Sunday, Stabroek News reported that after glitches during production startup saw flaring of over 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas, ExxonMobil had assured the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that it will from this week begin transitioning to using the gas for well injection purposes.
“Now that they [ExxonMobil] have learned and redesigned equipment, we do have a high degree of confidence that we won’t have this prolonged flaring,” EPA Director Vincent Adams told this newspaper when contacted last week for an update.
“We have this commitment from the company; transitioning from total flaring to zero should be accomplished by this week,” he added.
While he did not go into detail, Department of Energy (DE) Director Dr Mark Bynoe had earlier this month informed that delays in the ramping up of production to the expected 120,000 barrels per day had been set back by compressor problems.
He did not also make mention of the large gas volume racked up to date by flaring, although government had said that there would be none.
When testing was carried out on Exxon’s Liza well in the Stabroek Block offshore Guyana, it was determined that it is an associated-gas well that comprises both crude oil and natural gas.
And when government signed a new Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) with the company back in 2016, it had said that except for necessary testing, there would be no flaring of natural gas found offshore and that was in keeping with its commitment to developing a “green state”.
“We also determined that under no circumstances… there will be flaring of the gas,” Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman, had said when the contract with ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, EEPGL and its partners was announced in 2017.
“It is common industry practice that there is flaring and we determined that given the green commitment and approach made by His Excellency [President David Granger], that Exxon will not flare the natural gas that would accompany the find,” he added.
Trotman’s position then would have been in line with Mangal’s recommendations on flaring but it is unclear how the company was allowed to continue using flaring for so long, particularly from production start up to now.
Mangal said that he had proposed a gas to shore project and it was to be sanctioned at the same time as ExxonMobil’s Liza 2 Project.
“The pipeline project was to be sanctioned at the same time as Liza 2. But after I left in March 2018, it seems no one in government cared about flaring or bringing gas to shore, and it seems the pipeline project was delayed or shelved,” he said, while lamenting that it seems that “the government decision makers have other priorities”.
The APNU+AFC government has proposed that as it seeks to transition to renewable energy, that natural gas be brought onshore in the interim and talks have been ongoing with ExxonMobil to this end.
Up to last year, ExxonMobil’s Country Representative Rod Henson had said that the discussions were still ongoing towards this end and that if an agreement was reached soon, Guyana could see natural gas being used in its energy mix by 2022.
“I think our current view is, if we can do it in a timely fashion, get the environmental impact assessment and what’s not, we are likely looking at 2022, 2023 timeframe, plus or minus,” the ExxonMobil official had told the Parliamentary Committee on Natural Resources in 2018.
His views were echoed by then Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson, who told Stabroek News that even as the negotiations continue, government was preparing for the cleaner and cheaper alternative to heavy fuels, while it simultaneously put mechanisms in place to one day convert to renewable energy sources.
“That is a fair comment [the 2022-2023 projection by Henson]. The timeline is dependent on when we reach final agreement. We still have much to do, important things such as the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] approval. However, the idea was always to have the units up and running before the gas is delivered,” the de facto minister, who is responsible for energy generation, said.
Should there be a change in government after the current recount process of the March 2nd General and Regional Elections, it is possible that agreements reached would be kept as the PPP/C government has said that it is committed to also bringing natural gas onshore in its first five years in office.
