By Oil and Gas Governance Network (OGGN)
OGGN’s mission is to educate and bring pressure to bear on Guyana’s policy makers to make sure the oil curse doesn’t happen in Guyana. You can learn more about OGGN at www.oggn.org/about, and you can also learn about the many issues with respect to our oil in the recently launched OGGN Magazine at https://www.oggn.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/OGGN-2022-Winter-Magazine.pdf.
This week the Guyana Energy Conference & Expo will have government officials representing about 2.2 billion citizens around the world speaking at its inaugural conference. Guyana will be hosting dignitaries such as the President of Ghana and ambassadors and high commissioners from America, Canada, India and the European Union. Why are these international elites clamouring to present for a few minutes at a conference hosted by a country that has less than a million people? The reason is we have sweet, light crude oil, and lots of it. But while the leaders of some of the largest countries in the world are jostling to secure energy resources to keep their citizens warm in their ice-cold countries, our own Government has lost focus on securing better terms for our resources. The Government of Guyana (GoG) seems more interested in throwing a party for these foreign leaders and their appointed dignitaries than in ensuring that Guyanese benefit the most from our resources. It appears the GoG is confused about who owns the oil. The invitees to the party should have been the Guyanese people who own the petroleum resources, not the foreigners looking to exploit our oil and gas. The GoG can significantly change the lives of many Guyanese by using the approval by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the Yellowtail Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and field development plan as bargaining chips to get a fair deal.
In Guyana, 41% of the population lives below the world poverty marker of US$5.50 a day. That is 320,000 people barely surviving day to day. In a classroom, that may be every other student without any light to finish their homework during the night; that is almost all the vendors you buy fish from in the markets. Only a tiny portion of our population can afford the US$350 in person registration fee for this energy event which is being held at the Marriott Hotel. This begs the question – why even have the event in Guyana?
In the Guyanese conception lottery, it is almost a coin toss if you are born into poverty or not. If you are born into poverty, you are most likely to remain there. Our confirmed reserves stand at 10 billion barrels of oil. Using a price of US$80/barrel, Guyana is losing an estimated US$91 billion dollars compared to a fair deal. A fair deal would put us in the middle of the pack out of 67 oil regimes around the world instead of being at the bottom of the barrel. The US$91 billion can almost triple the income of the 320,000 Guyanese for about 50 years – a definitive leap out of poverty.
The discovery of sweet light crude in Guyana that is the envy of many oil producing nations made the local and international headlines in May 2015. The scramble by well-connected business people for petroleum concessions in the preceding months indicates that this discovery was well known in the oil patch before the GoG was officially informed.
However, coming up on 7 years since oil was discovered, many of our people can barely survive while the oil executives who exploit the Stabroek Block will dine in luxury at this conference. After a day of listening to speakers at the conference gush over Guyana’s oil reserves, the oil executives will scan the dinner menu of the Marriott Hotel and savour the choice of offerings. Given that their dinner expenses will be covered by their companies, they may try our seafood offerings since we are known for our fresh fish and shrimps. A four-course meal from the Marriott menu that they are likely to choose may look like this:
That is US$91.90 for a meal for one oil executive. In December 2021, Red Thread published an article that detailed the meals of a family of 3 consisting of a security guard, young adult and a six-year-old child. The article noted that they hardly ever eat fresh fish or meat. Here is a reproduction of Day Three meals from the article.
DAY THREE:
Breakfast: Bread, eggs and tea (no milk)
Lunch: One order of Chinese food, divided among three persons – GY$1000.00
Dinner: Toast bread and drink
On Day Three, the Guyanese family splurged on Chinese food for GY$1,000 (US$4.76). If we scan the Marriott menu, we would quickly observe that the GY$1,000 would buy a side dish at the Marriott such as a plate of Basmati Rice or some vegetables. Thus, an oil executive would likely pay for one meal a sum of US$91.90 that could feed the Red Thread sample working class family, that is 3 persons, food for 19 meals! But 19 meals is an underestimation as drinks were not included in the cost of the oil executive’s meal; wine and cocktails can easily cost as much as a meal. And don’t forget the value-added tax.
While dining on our world class seafood, the oil executives would hardly realize the plight of our artisanal fishermen. This is a segment of our population that has nourished us for generations with one of the healthiest sources of proteins. Our government may be trading off keeping us healthy with enriching foreigners with our oil. But fish is also an essential part of our culture as many Guyanese dishes include fish, from stewed red snapper to curried gillbacker. The GoG seems ignorant and uncaring of the impact that the reported reduction in fish being caught has on the Guyanese culture and health.
Our fishing industry has come under strain from around the time we started to pump first oil in December 2019. We don’t know if the significant depletion in the fish being caught is because of the enormous amount of contaminated waste water that is being dumped into our ocean as the oil is being pumped, or other causes. Many of the artisanal fishermen started fishing when they were young teenagers and that is the only job they know. Many of them don’t know how to read or write. If they can’t fish, what jobs are there for our fishermen? The government is holding an expensive conference to hear the thoughts of mainly foreigners but has it held any conference to learn about the plight of our artisanal fishermen? We don’t even have baseline data to begin to understand what is going on in our waters.
Before the EPA issues the environmental permit for Yellowtail, it should commit to its promise of doing better contained in its lengthy release reported on by Stabroek News on December 1, 2021, in which it underlined its intention to bolster processes and adhere to the Environmental Protection Act. The EPA has been given money to buy monitoring equipment and yet there is monitoring equipment sitting idle. The EPA has also been funded to train its staff. Its priority should be to perform monitoring – with the Fisheries Department of the Ministry of Agriculture – to decipher issues such as why the fish stocks are in decline. The EPA’s priority should lie with the people of Guyana, not the oil executives whose primary goal is to increase the stock price of their shareholders.
If one looks at the Energy Conference website (https://guyanaenergy.gy/), it is a sleek website where everything seems to work. This in contrast to the Ministry of Natural Resource’s website (https://petroleum.gov.gy), which has not been active for months. Even functionality, which requires only a few minutes to fix, such as the ‘Contact Us’ form, does not work. This Ministry of Natural Resources website appears to host information that should be disclosed as part of the required reporting to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), but the government seems lax in properly maintaining the website. The EITI’s purpose in requiring the release of this data is to ensure enhanced transparency and accountability by governments to their citizens. It has been 4 months now since OGGN pointed out EITI non-compliance issues related to oil production reports and tax receipts, with letters to that effect published in Stabroek News on October 12 and 17; however to date there has not been any responsive action by the government. The priority of the government is clearly demonstrated: it can find the resources to build and maintain a fully functioning website for this Energy Expo which appears to have little benefit for the majority of Guyanese compared to the defective one hosted by the Ministry of Natural Resources that should allow the Guyanese public to see how much oil is being produced daily and how much of our gas is being flared, consumed and re-injected – and hence whether any gas is actually available for the proposed Gas-to-Energy pipeline.
The GoG should never forget that at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Americans and Canadians ensured that there were enough vaccines for their citizens before they started sharing them with countries like Guyana. You know your friends in the time of your greatest need. Hence, instead of throwing a party for foreign elites, the GoG should get its priorities straight and put Guyanese first with a top priority being to uplift the 320,000 Guyanese who have nothing to eat but a few biscuits and a morsel of cheese for dinner. There are many issues that need to be resolved before the GoG rushes to approve Yellowtail. We need to ensure that the parent oil companies have comprehensive insurance to cover a massive oil spill (USD 60+ billion for a Macondo-type spill). We need to have a fair deal where we have the majority benefit from our oil resources. We also need to audit the billions of USD expenses that the GoG has to refund to the oil companies. Wouldn’t it be outrageous if the type of expenses being refunded were to include those seafood meals consumed by oil executives at events like the Guyana Energy Expo? We don’t even know if this is the case, because our government’s priority seems skewed to cater to the foreign oil companies and not to citizens whom it should serve. As Guyanese we urgently need to reset our national priorities, and to demand that Guyanese people be put first.