Government reviewing Japan funded ‘Oil and Gas Master Plan’ for Guyana

Georgetown, Guyana – (March 3, 2018) The Government of Guyana is reviewing an ‘Oil and Gas Master Plan’ for Guyana, which was developed and submitted by Mitsubishi Corporation and Chiyoda Corporation in collaboration with the Government of Japan. The plan has as key objectives the development of Guyana’s domestic oil industry, the creation of a balance in the domestic usage and exportation of products from indigenous oil and gas, the harmonisation of the industry in keeping with Guyana’s ‘green’ development agenda and the quantifying of the economic feasibility of the plans.

The report was presented yesterday to President David Granger at a meeting at State House. Present at the meeting were Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Carl Greenidge, who is also performing the duties of Prime Minister and Minister of Natural Resources, Mr. Raphael Trotman, along with the delegation from Japan, headed by Mr. Takeo Suzuki, Acting Head of the Strategic Business Planning Section, Chiyoda Corporation. Following that engagement, Minister Greenidge, in an invited comment, said that Government will carefully review the proposal so that a decision can be made on the way forward.

“This is the final report presented. They have had discussions with Finance, Public Infrastructure and Natural Resources. It remains now for us to conclude our examination of that final report and then to respond to the Government of Japan. We will probably, within the next fortnight respond to them saying that we have looked at the report and now that we are ready to go forward, we would like them to fund the preparation of detailed economic feasibility studies for each of the projects and then we will see what they come up with,” he said.

The Government of Japan is funding the technical work, which also includes the creation of a roadmap towards balancing Guyana’s oil and gas future with its ‘green’ development agenda.

“At this point, we have been discussing what follows from the discovery of petroleum and Guyana’s offshore and in response to that, the Japanese have offered work with us to plan the utilisation of our resource. The MITI, which is the International Department of Trade and Industry as well as the Central Government of Japan have agreed to fund technical work by Mitsubishi, one of the world’s largest corporations together with Chiyoda, which works on projects of various technical types and what they have done is to look at what we have done by way of resource, look at the plan that ExxonMobil, CNOC and Hess [Corporation] have for the petroleum and gas that has been discovered and to work out, given world prices, given that we also have renewable energy and so on, how best to move forward with the produce that will be landed in 2020,” Minister Greenidge said.