Six companies today submitted bids in Guyana’s first auction for available offshore blocks with United States oil major ExxonMobil again seeking to expand its portfolio here.
The receipt of the bids also saw Middle East oil and gas power house Qatar submitting a bid, a move that coincides with a one-day visit from the Emir of that state.
Bids for the auction which will be evaluated from September 18th to October 6th were this morning received at the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, Kingston. Noticeably absent from the bidding are India and Indian companies. The number of bids and their origins would be seen to be below the government’s expectations.
The bid round for the auction had been three times postposed, as government had said it would await the completion of an upgrade of the entire regulatory framework to facilitate the process.
Those documents are a new Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), along with a new Petroleum Activities Bill 2023.
In August of last year, Minister of Natural Resources, Vickram Bharrat, told Stabroek News that government was still in the process of putting measures in place for the highly anticipated auctioning of available offshore blocks, and consequently the auction would not have been likely before the end of the third quarter of 2022.
