THE global oil industry is well on track to repeating the feat achieved in 2018, when around 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) recoverable resources were discovered and Guyana is second on the list for the most discoveries so far for this year.

This was according to Norwegian research company, Rystad Energy, in a report which highlighted the discoveries of oil, globally. According to Rystad, oil and gas companies have discovered 7.7 billion BOE to date.

The research company said Russia has seen the most discovered resources thus far in 2019, with the Dinkov and Nyarmeyskoye discovery announced earlier this year holding around 1.5 billion BOE of recoverable resources. Guyana and Cyprus nabbed the other places on the podium.

“The industry has high hopes after the prolific success of ExxonMobil’s Stabroek block off the coast of Guyana and more recent discoveries by other operators in the Region, which have led to a surge in offshore exploration in the Caribbean,” the company stated in its report.

More acreage is being made available for bidding, with some countries conducting their first-ever licensing rounds in 2019 and 2020. Offshore drilling activity has been on a steady rise in recent years, with 23 new exploration wells expected in 2019. By comparison, only seven offshore wells were drilled in 2013.

Rystad Energy expects the Guyana-Suriname basin will continue to occupy headlines with a few planned wells in both Guyana and Suriname.

The basin is pinned as one of the most prospective, underexplored basins in the world and will definitely get a facelift from its current assigned volumes if hydrocarbons are established towards the east.

Just last month, two oil finds offshore Guyana were announced by Tullow Oil plc’s (Tullow) and ExxonMobil, which both stated that the finds of high-quality oil-bearing sandstone reservoirs bode well for the future of Guyana.
The Joe-One find marked the second such for Tullow in the Orinduik block, having announced its first discovery at the Jethro-One well in August. ExxonMobil copped its 14th discovery in the Stabroek Block offshore Guyana at the Tripletail-One well in the Turbot area.

ExxonMobil’s discovery adds to the previously-announced estimated recoverable resource of more than six billion oil-equivalent.

Bloomberg had reported that Guyana’s reserves would make it Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)’s 12th-largest member after Angola.
At the time of the compilation of the report, ExxonMobil had projected that there were 5.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent resource in the Stabroek Block based on the finds, however, that figure that has been upgraded to six billion barrels.

Bloomberg noted that at Exxon’s Investor Day meeting at the New York Stock Exchange last March, Guyana took centre stage. “It’s not hard to see why. Senior Vice-President Neil Chapman – the exec who’d once described the Stabroek find as a “fairytale” – pointed to a chart featuring estimates from Wood Mackenzie Ltd., an Edinburgh-based energy consulting firm. It showed that Exxon’s Guyana wells will be the most profitable of all new deep-water projects by major oil companies,” it observed.

Guyana’s economy, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $3.63B, a growth rate of 4.1 per cent in 2018 and 4.6 per cent in 2019, is expected to further grow by 33.5 per cent and 22.9 per cent in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

This was according to the NASDAQ Stock Market, which is an American stock exchange. It is the second-largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalisation, behind only the New York Stock Exchange located in the same city. NASDAQ said, with a per-capita income of $5,194, Guyana is a middle-income country and is covered by dense forest. It is home to fertile agricultural lands and abundant natural resources.