Following the approval of India’s cabinet to a proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to deepen the energy relations between Georgetown and New Delhi, Foreign Minis-ter of the South-Asian country Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will be in Guyana to sign the document, the government announced yesterday.
“The MoU will deal with a number of issues. The MoU will deal with exploring the possibility of trading in crude oil, that is [the] sale of crude oil, but we agreed with the minister that this has to be beneficial to both countries and it has to follow market conditions. There is no agreement to sell any oil to India at this point in time. And any such agreement in the future will have to be competitive and will have to benefit both parties,” Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, who on Monday returned from a trip to India, told a press conference.
“… It deals with strengthening our regulatory capacity and sharing expertise building capacity in the staff at MRE… It also speaks about the collaboration in the future for natural gas… [as well as] potential areas for bilateral cooperation and developing our resources…”
Jagdeo said this country hopes to tap into India’s broad expertise.
Jagdeo, who was in India to attend the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS), said that he used the time to also have bilateral discussions with India, a follow-up to President Irfaan Ali’s visit there earlier this year.
He informed that along with the proposed energy MOU, discussions centred around agriculture, agro-processing, education, healthcare and human resource capacity building among other areas.
As regards specific initiatives, such as direct purchasing of crude or discussions on exploration and development of offshore areas set aside for that purpose, India will make an offer specific to the respective cause and it will be assessed on its merit, he added.
And according to Jagdeo, ExxonMobil is set to relinquish some 20% of its prolific Stabroek Block next year. “Those areas would be available also for bilateral and possibly, if the bilateral agreements don’t yield the results that we hope they would yield, they will also be available for auction. So we have made no definitive decision on the 20 per cent being relinquished…,” he said. “We believe that some bilateral arrangements could complement the more commercial type arrangements with the private sector that we are getting through the auctions.”
Throughout the press conference, Jagdeo periodically emphasised that no agreement had been signed with India. “There has been no bilateral agreement on any engagement entered into with any government so far. … We are only discussing with India a framework agreement.”
ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) and the government had been in discussions on the relinquishment obligation. The relinquishing of blocks was set to take effect in 2023, but due to COVID-19 pandemic related setbacks, ExxonMobil had requested a one-year extension.
When asked to identify the effects of the pandemic on operations here, ExxonMobil had said, “Since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, we have experienced an aggregate loss in excess of 40 months of drilling rig time across our rig fleet, with the exploration programme in Stabroek alone set back by more than 12 months.
“More specifically, initial travel restrictions affected our ability to bring in rotational workers from abroad in a timely manner which forced us to place two drill ships in holding; the Stena Carron and Noble Tom Madden. We were also unable to deploy additional drillships in Guyanese waters to execute planned drilling campaigns. ExxonMobil Guyana has been continuously working to limit the disruption of COVID-19 to our operations. However, there were unavoidable delays to exploration and appraisal drilling schedules which have been transparently disclosed to the government.”
