Yearbook 2017
Guyana. At the end of July, the US oil company ExxonMobil
confirmed that new oil deposits had been discovered in the
so-called Payare reservoir, part of the large Stabroek Block
oil field about 130 nautical miles off the coast of Guyana.
In total, the oil field could produce the equivalent of up
to 3 billion barrels of oil as of 2020. As a result of the
new discoveries, infrastructure worth $ 500 million needs to
be built on the Berbice River.
According to
Countryaah.com, the Stabroek Bloc is located along the entire coast of
Guyana, and the oil discovery in July brought to light the
more than 100-year-old, infected border dispute with
neighboring Venezuela over Essequibo, the eastern half of
Guyana and off the coast of which the Stabroek bloc
partially lies. The dispute with Venezuela has also affected
the rights to oil in the area in question. In September,
Guyana President David Granger argued before the UN General
Assembly in New York that the border dispute should be
resolved definitively by the International Court of Justice
in The Hague (ICJ), something the Venezuelan government
opposes. Observers noted that, from a historical
perspective, Venezuela does not want a military solution to
the conflict, but prefers to maintain the uncertainty about
the status of the area by delaying the issue, while Guyana
wants an international court ruling in its favor and that
Essequibo is finally declared to be part of Guyana. The
provocative tone between the United States and Venezuela
suggests that the United States will unreservedly support
Guiana's rights in this context. The fact that the oil
discovery in the Payares reservoir was made by ExxonMobil
also made the issue extra difficult, since ExxonMobil's
assets in Venezuela were nationalized in 2007 and that the
current US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was both
chairman and CEO of the company.
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