Guyana On The Hunt For Oil Firm To Trade Its Oil

Guyana’s government is on the lookout for an oil company or oil trading firm to sell and market its brand new crude oil, according to the director of the Department of Energy Mark Bynoe, Reuters said on Thursday.

With Guyana’s oil industry still in its infancy, it does not yet have the resources to market its own crude oil that it is entitled to from the wildly successful consortium of ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC that found 15 discoveries in 2019.

Guyana will ask international oil companies (IOCs) and oil trading firms next month for proposals to be the country’s agent.

Guyana officially shipped its very first batch of crude oil on Monday, when Exxon sent a Suezmax tanker loaded with a million barrels of the Liza sweet crude oil to one of its refineries in the United States.

The Exxon/Hess/CNOOC consortium are anticipating that production will reach 750,000 barrels per day by 2025, which would bring Guyana a serious oil exporter.

Shell won a bid to market the first three cargoes of oil from Guyana, after the Exxon Consortium launched its oil production from the Liza field ahead of schedule, less than five years after initial discovery.

Shell’s winning bid has been the source of some political controversy, with Guyana presidential hopeful Irfaan Ali vowing to review the terms of all of the oil deals signed by the current government, adding that the government was not transparent when it chose Shell to sell the first few oil cargoes, Reuters said on Thursday. Nine IOCs were invited to bid.

Guyana has said that it chose Shell in part because of the global reach of Shell’s trading operations, as well as its strong presence in Latin American markets.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

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