In what is being described as the emergence of a regional deep water province, former Trinidad and Tobago Minister of Energy and Energy Affairs, Kevin Ramnarine, believes that Guyana lies at the heart of this petroleum-rich geological system.
After Tullow Oil’s world class discovery of the Jubilee field offshore Ghana in 2007 followed by its 2011 Zaedyus discovery offshore French Guiana, interest was renewed in the Atlantic Mirror Theory which hypothesizes that there are similarities in geology between the South American and African coasts.
“We started to believe that what was on the west coast of Africa where there were a lot of big discoveries being made was mirrored in the Guianas; Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana,” Ramnarine told OilNOW during an interview at the Marriott Hotel in Georgetown on Wednesday.
“My understanding is that that correlation does not exist for Trinidad since it has no West African analogue. This is the view of some geologists and geologists are neither totally right nor totally wrong,” he pointed out.
Ramnarine said what is clear is that “there is an emerging deep water province in the Southern Caribbean and Guyana is of course at the heart of that.”
He pointed to the more than 3.2 billion barrels of recoverable crude that US oil major ExxonMobil has found to date off the Guyana coast as well as discoveries and exploration activities ongoing in French Guiana and Suriname.
“As we speak, June 2018, BHP is beginning to resume exploration drilling in Trinidad. So very soon we’ll have four drill ships working simultaneously between Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname. So it’s a scenario which has tremendous potential for the region,” the former TT Energy Minister said.
It was reported in March that BHP Billiton was looking to drill three wells back-to-back in Trinidad; “one south, one north and then one south,” Niall McCormack, the company’s Vice-President for Global Exploration, had said on the sidelines of the CERAWeek conference in Houston.
Ramnarine believes that heightened exploration activities in the Guyana-Suriname Basin and renewed drilling in Trinidad and Tobago point to the emergence of a regional deep water industry with Guyana at its core.
