…US$267.6M now banked offshore in NRF
On the heels of the fifth oil lift that Guyana received last month, the Government of Guyana has confirmed that the country received payment for the lift, deposited directly into the country’s Natural Resource Fund (NRF) at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
The New York Federal Reserve Bank, where Guyana’s funds are earning interest
This was confirmed on Wednesday by the Natural Resources Ministry, which also listed all the payments Guyana has received for its oil resources and also recommitted to continued transparency and accountability.
“On February 05, 2021, 997, 420 barrels of oil were lifted from Liza Destiny with a value of US$61 million with a grand total to date of 5,009,797 barrels of oil worth US$246.5 million. Inclusive of royalties, the total in the Natural Resource Fund Account now stands at US$267.6 million,” the release said.
In providing a recap, the Ministry explained that Guyana received its first payment of US$54.9 million for an oil lift dated February 19, 2020. Guyana’s second lift on May 21, 2020, was valued at US$35 million. The third lift, which occurred on August 9, 2020, was valued at US$46 million, while the fourth lift occurred on December 9, 2020 and came in at US$49.4 million in value.
Guyana, with oil giant ExxonMobil as operator, began producing oil on December 20, 2019 in the Stabroek block. Guyana’s oil revenues are being banked in the New York Federal Reserve, where it is earning interest.
President Dr Irfaan Ali has said that Guyana’s oil and gas resources would play a critical role in its development. According to President Ali, some of the money from the sector will go towards developing world-class education and health-care systems for the people.
“We have to address what are the hindrances to our development. 1), the cost of energy; human capital; the lack of transformative infrastructure; a health-care system that is not modern; an education system that needs continuous modernization,” President Ali had said in a broadcast last month.
“We have set ourselves some very ambitious goals and a strategic vision in how we’re going to achieve this. First of all, we have to build a world-class education system. And this is where the resources that will come from oil and gas will go, to ensure we have a world-class education and health-care system,” President Ali said.
The President had gone further in laying out his vision for how Guyana could progress using some of the money from the oil and gas sector. According to him, monies can also be used to build infrastructure that will transform the physical landscape of Guyana and to open up new opportunities in the productive sectors.
“(We must) open up new opportunities in agriculture, industries, manufacturing, aquaculture. The wealth must be able to create new opportunities of growing new forms of wealth while at the same time stabilising existing sectors,” he posited.
Besides the Liza Field where all of Guyana’s oil lift revenues have come from, Exxon also has the Liza Phase 2 Development, for which development drilling has already started. The development will see six drill centres being set up, along with approximately 30 wells – 15 production, nine water injection and six gas injection wells. At the time, former Department of Energy Head, Dr Mark Bynoe had said that Exxon’s approval to pursue the project was subject to a number of conditions and confirmatory studies.
These include the establishment of a Regional Capping Stack or other solutions to ensure that a Capping Stack can be deployed within five days of a well control event with loss of containment; improving the targeted availability of the overall production system of the Liza Phase 2 Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel to between 98 per cent and 99 per cent, and identifying potential cost savings synergies between Liza Phase 1 and Liza Phase 2. (G3)
