Oil production dips by 5,000 barrels per day

The Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel, Liza Destiny.

Guyana’s oil production from the Liza One well has dropped by about 5,000 barrels per day, a top sector official said Sunday.

Natural Resources Minister, Vickram Bharrat says the production has not dropped much and that ExxonMobil was trying to find the “right balance” between flaring excess gas and maximising production.

Mr. Bharrat’s disclosure of an actual figure has come days after ExxonMobil merely said that production has been reduced as a result of a damaged gas compressor which is being sent to Germany for repairs. He  refuted suggestions in some quarters that the compressor was damaged due to increased production.

ExxonMobil says it does not release production figures and has referred all such queries to the government.

The only figures that that American oil company has released to date is that it is using or reinjecting at least 88 percent of the gas associated with oil production at the Liza well. Mr. Bharrat has already said that the aim is to keep flaring as close as possible to 15 million cubic metres of gas per day.

The Natural Resources Minister says Guyanese authorities will soon be able to get real-time data about oil and gas production when ExxonMobil installs its own submarine fibre optic cable.

Mr. Bharrat says this will allow ExxonMobil to feed all of its data immediately to a data room at the Ministry of Natural Resources. He says that the government will be spending US$4 million from a US$20  million World Bank-funded project to build the data centre and train personnel. A  Request for Proposal, he said, was in the works to get a company with the expertise to install the data centre.

Currently, he says, all of Guyana’s oil production data is stored at ExxonMobil’s headquarters in the United States.

Stressing that “I am not playing politics,”  the Natural Resources Minister said the data centre for real-time transfer of production data should have been in place before ‘First Oil’ in December, 2019.