The US oil and en­er­gy gi­ant, Exxon­Mo­bil, says it plans to ex­plore for oil off­shore the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion where Venezue­lan gun­boats had six years ago chased seis­mic re­search ves­sels in oil con­ces­sions that had been grant­ed by Guyana.

“The Liza field, the last time I looked, takes you pret­ty close to that (equidis­tant) line. We plan to drill two ex­plo­ration wells west of Liza and Pa­yara. The Trum­pet Fish and Red­moth ex­plo­ration wells are planned more in the mid­dle of the Stabroek Block dur­ing the course of this year so it's not in­hibit­ing that ac­tiv­i­ty in our plans,” said Pres­i­dent of Exxon­Mo­bil Guyana, Al­is­tair Rout­ledge.

In 2015, Venezuela’s Pres­i­dent, Nico­las Maduro had uni­lat­er­al­ly ex­tend­ed his coun­try’s mar­itime bound­ary to take in all of the wa­ters off the Es­se­qui­bo, De­mer­ara and Berbice coun­ties af­ter Exxon­Mo­bil had first an­nounced its first oil dis­cov­ery off­shore Guyana. Venezuela’s navy had al­so in­ter­cept­ed two seis­mic re­search ves­sels in 2018 that had been gath­er­ing da­ta for Amer­i­can com­pa­nies, Anadarko Pe­tro­le­um and Exxon­Mo­bil, off the Es­se­qui­bo Re­gion.

Rout­ledge said the com­pa­ny planned to spend around US$60-70 mil­lion on each ex­plo­ration well, but that cost could es­ca­late if more da­ta has to be gath­ered and stem drill tests have to be con­duct­ed.

He ac­knowl­edged that the re­cent Guyana-Venezuela bor­der dis­pute, where Cara­cas has in­sist­ed that it has own­er­ship of the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion, which makes up about two-thirds of Guyana and is home to 125,000 of the coun­try’s 800,000 cit­i­zens, had “made a lot of peo­ple ner­vous”.

But he main­tained that Exxon­Mo­bil’s agree­ment with Guyana is le­gal.

“Exxon­Mo­bil has a com­fort where we be­lieve the con­tract which we have with the coun­try is valid un­der the lo­cal law but al­so un­der in­ter­na­tion­al law we have valid rights to the blocks in which we are par­tic­i­pat­ing,” Rout­ledge said.

He wel­comed the Ar­gyle De­c­la­ra­tion that emerged out of last De­cem­ber’s talks be­tween Guyana’s Pres­i­dent Ir­faan Ali and Maduro in which the two coun­tries agreed not to is­sue threats of force or use force.

He hailed height­ened de­fence co­op­er­a­tion be­tween the Unit­ed States and Guyana in the con­text of low car­bon emis­sions and sup­ply of en­er­gy to the rest of the world.

“The col­lab­o­ra­tion that we are see­ing for Guyana with oth­er coun­tries on the mil­i­tary front as well as on the diplo­mat­ic and eco­nom­ic front re­flects that and so I think it’s a healthy thing,” he said.

US Air Force Ma­jor Gen­er­al, Evan L. Pet­tus, 12th Air Force (Air Forces South­ern) Com­man­der, last week vis­it­ed Guyana and held talks with gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials and top brass of the Guyana De­fence Force to on-air do­main aware­ness and col­lab­o­rat­ing on ad­vanc­ing Guyana’s air­space aware­ness ca­pac­i­ty to pro­tect its na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and sov­er­eign­ty.

GEORGE­TOWN, Guyana, Feb 7, CMC – 

CMC/gt/ir/2024