Mark Wil­son

For David Granger, it was a good week. In­deed, weeks don't come a lot bet­ter.

Sat­ur­day: he was sworn in as pres­i­dent of Guyana, af­ter a long, tough cam­paign.

Wednes­day: Exxon­Mo­bil an­nounced Guyana's first-ever sig­nif­i­cant oil find. It looks like a big­gie.

When Brig Granger was com­man­der of Guyana's de­fence force in the 1980s, flour and cheese were all but un­ob­tain­able. A hand­ful of an­cient Austins and horse-drawn carts trun­dled the streets of George­town.

Now he's pres­i­dent, will he pre­side over an oil boom? Lat­er maybe. Exxon­Mo­bil's find could trans­form Guyana, but not this week. Guyanese dai­ly Kai­eteur News re­ports that for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Ramo­tar left the Gov­ern­ment's con­sol­i­dat­ed fund deep in over­draft.

Exxon­Mo­bil's Liza-1 well was spud­ded on March 5, around 120 miles off­shore. Exxon­Mo­bil has a 45 per cent stake through its Guyana af­fil­i­ate; Hess Guyana holds 30 per cent; and 25 per cent is with a sub­sidiary of Chi­na Na­tion­al Off­shore Oil Cor­po­ra­tion, one of the three big Chi­nese state-owned oil com­pa­nies.

Hess and CNOOC re­placed Shell, which pulled out some time back. Shell must be kick­ing it­self.

Up­stream mag­a­zine calls the find "po­ten­tial­ly mas­sive." There are 295 feet of high-qual­i­ty oil-bear­ing sand­stones in an up­per Cre­ta­ceous tur­bidite fan.

A US an­a­lyst talks of da­ta from Hess which point to over 1.6 bil­lion bar­rels of oil in the wider Stabroek block, which in­cludes Liza. That would be twice T&T's to­tal oil re­serves.

But it's deep–Liza-1 was drilled to al­most 18,000 feet in wa­ter depths of over 5,700 feet. Costs will be high; to make it com­mer­cial, there has to be a lot of oil–par­tic­u­lar­ly at to­day's shaky oil price. It will take months of analy­sis to find whether the sums stack up.

Exxon­Mo­bil has a con­ser­v­a­tive and me­thod­i­cal cor­po­rate cul­ture. They won't rush things. But they do have re­serve re­place­ment is­sues–so if the num­bers look good, they will want to pump.

But when? There's no in­fra­struc­ture. To get pipelines and on­shore stor­age in place could take eight years or more. Mean­while, Guyana has no deep­wa­ter port re­mote­ly able to take an oil tanker.

There has long been talk of a deep­wa­ter har­bour at the mouth of the Berbice. A big oil find could pro­vide an im­pe­tus. But con­struc­tion would be a tough call. There are strong off­shore cur­rents, with huge puls­es of Ama­zon­ian silt mov­ing along the coast.

Get­ting a de­tailed de­sign would take years. Get­ting it built could take a decade–and that's as­sum­ing that this chal­leng­ing piece of ma­rine en­gi­neer­ing hits no un­fore­seen snags.

The fastest way of get­ting the oil out would be a float­ing pro­duc­tion, stor­age and of­fload­ing ves­sel, per­ma­nent­ly moored over the well and un­load­ing oil on­to a tanker.

That might be good news for Petrotrin. There's no re­fin­ery in Guyana; T&T could be the right place to re­fine small­ish tanker-loads of Guyanese oil.

A sys­tem like that could be up and pump­ing a year or two ahead of Guyana's next elec­tion, due by 2020.

David Granger an­nounced a bunch of min­is­ters last Wednes­day–but he kept nat­ur­al re­sources for him­self, with­in the Of­fice of the Pres­i­dent. That was per­haps a dis­ap­point­ment for Ru­pert Roop­naraine of the Work­ing Peo­ple's Al­liance, who han­dled the port­fo­lio ably while in op­po­si­tion; that's pol­i­tics.

At his fi­nal ral­ly two days be­fore Guyana's elec­tion, the Brig an­nounced pro­pos­als for a Sov­er­eign Wealth Fund. Did he get ear­ly wind of Exxon­Mo­bil's find? The PPP's Robert Per­saud had talked of hy­dro­car­bon shows a few days ear­li­er, but in the vaguest of terms.

Be­sides Liza-1, there are oth­er promis­ing oil prospects off­shore from Guyana and Suri­name. Up­stream mag­a­zine re­ports that Exxon­Mo­bil is al­ready lin­ing up its Ranger prospect north-west from Liza-1, with seis­mic work now un­der way. That has dif­fer­ent ge­ol­o­gy; it's an Up­per Juras­sic lime­stoney build-up with Low­er Ter­tiary clas­tic sed­i­ments. Rep­sol and CGX are al­so due to spud shal­low­er wells this year in their Guyanese blocks.

In Suri­namese wa­ters, Apache this year drilled Popokai-1, re­port­ed­ly with oil shows but no com­mer­cial prospects. Petronas is now drilling off­shore from Suri­name.

All this looks love­ly for Guyana's new gov­ern­ment. For for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Ramo­tar and the Peo­ple's Pro­gres­sive Par­ty it must be tru­ly galling. They lost pow­er by a mar­gin of one per cent of the votes, just days be­fore a mas­sive oil find.

That may be why they have re­fused to ad­mit that they lost the vote, fair and square; one rea­son why they're in a sulk, threat­en­ing protests and le­gal ac­tion. In­deed, for­mer agri­cul­ture min­is­ter Leslie Ram­sam­my blames his par­ty's elec­tion loss on "elec­toral fraud" linked to "in­ter­na­tion­al stake­hold­ers" who are "in­ter­est­ed in Guyana's oil de­posits."

Don­ald Ramo­tar did get him­self a lit­tle fun be­fore the elec­tion. He had him­self pho­tographed, por­ing over a ta­ble spread with Exxon­Mo­bil's well logs. Those pho­tos were joy to the heart of in­dus­try an­a­lysts, who ig­nored dear Don­ald's sage fea­tures, and zoomed in on the logs them­selves, which ap­pear to show four high­light­ed pay zones, three with oil and one with gas.

For once, the Ramo­tar gov­ern­ment's com­mu­ni­ca­tions ef­fort gave some tru­ly in­for­ma­tive re­sults.