Introduction
As observed last week, eight of the world’s top ten producers of barrels of oil per day are National Oil Companies, NOCs. As a group these NOCs account for 55 percent of global crude oil production. Utilizing techniques that are applied universally, available estimates of the average effective rate of taxation for Guyana’s oil and gas sector under the present PSA rules and arrangements reveal results ranging from 50 to 60 percent. The IDB study that I have been using to illustrate my presentation on this topic has arrived at an estimate of 51 percent.
As I have observed on several previous occasions, this ratio yields an amount of windfall petroleum revenues over the years that is enough to remove the scourge of income poverty from Guyana. Instead of addressing this potential as the priority or golden opportunity for the economic and social transformation of the country, the noise and nonsense mis-informers are claiming Guyana is only getting crumbs from producing petroleum under the ruling PSA. Often this is reduced to scarily ill-informed environmental and other outdated dogmas, which are then proffered as reasons to justify leaving our petroleum wealth where it is presently buried. That is, to remain out of production forever, in order to contain ghg emissions. This shows a scary and disturbing willingness to sacrifice the Guyanese poor (the other).