Introduction
Today’s column is the fourth in my recently introduced sub-series of columns on the topic of Guyana Government Take and Reported Reserves This is due to the private urgings of several readers who have been pressing me to re-visit my previous columns on this topic. This is because of their current confusion in the face of a growing deluge of mis-information, dis-information, noise, and nonsense about Guyana’s emerging oil and gas sector, flourishing in local, regional and global sections of the social and print media. They attribute this phenomenon randomly to both not knowing better and deliberate intent.
Thus far, when attending to this task I have addressed three broad areas of Production Sharing Agreements, PSAs; namely, 1] their intellectual origins as a social construct designed to govern the legal relation between a natural resource Owner and Contractor that “utilizes the resource for benefit;” 2] the generic critiques generated out of the real time evolution of PSAs; and 3] the dynamic and disruptive features of PSAs as an innovative social construct. In attending to this task to date, I have also drawn largely on analysis and columns published over the 2017/2018 period, which is before the Stabroek Block PSA was made a public document