Venezuela contacts gas multinationals to exploit a field that is also in Guyana’s waters

Venezuela has begun contacting energy companies involved in a long-pending offshore gas project to push them to start new exploration and operations near its maritime border with Guyana, five people close to the talks said.

The call for action on blocks that have not been touched for more than a decade comes amid an escalation of the territorial dispute with Guyana that has rocked the country and led to an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro wants state oil company PDVSA and oil majors BP Chevron and Shell to revive an offshore project with about 8 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves.

Called Plataforma Deltana, the discoveries were never developed due to insufficient capital, a sharing effort with Trinidad and Tobago, in whose waters the field lies, and a lack of clear rules for investment. The positioning is what you can see from the map below:

In 2019, both countries authorized Shell to develop the Trinidad portion of the larger field, called Manatee, with a final investment decision expected next year and gas production expected to begin in 2028.

Maduro recently backtracked on that decision, telling the Trinidad government in a public comment in September that the fields should be developed jointly. His government and PDVSA have started contacting companies to gauge their interest.

Chevron was the only company to complete exploration of the Plataforma Deltana, certifying 206 billion cubic meters of recoverable gas and declaring two of Venezuela's five blocks commercial in 2010. It has never taken steps to start production.

Russia's Rosneft has explored another block in recent years but has not completed work in the area, while TotalEnergies and Equinor have returned a block to Venezuela after a non-commercially exploitable discovery. One of the five blocks was never assigned.

“They are talking about working on blocks 2 and 4, which are the most advanced ones,” one of the sources said.

Could Deltana be the solution to the dispute?

The Plataforma Deltana is the energy project closest to the waters disputed by Venezuela with Guyana. Both nations have drawn maritime boundary lines that run through offshore oil and gas areas into territory claimed by the other.

Venezuela's oil ministry and PDVSA have worked since 2016 to outsource 2D seismic data collection and map areas including the Esequibo and Isla de Aves territories in the Caribbean, which are in dispute with Guyana and Dominica respectively, said Antero Alvarado, managing partner of consultancy Gas Energy Latin America.

“Venezuela has not completed seismic work for a long time. The urgency to do so now is given the dispute with Guyana and its renewed interest in exporting gas to markets such as Trinidad,” he said.

The territorial dispute with Guyana is being discussed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which this month ordered Venezuela to refrain from taking any action that would alter the situation with its neighbor. This came after Maduro's government voted in a referendum asking Venezuelans whether they accepted the ICJ's jurisdiction over the issue. The Venezuelans did not accept.

If the solution to the dispute between Venezuela and Guyana could come precisely from the sale and development of this enormous deposit to Venezuela, in collaboration with some Western company capable of investing the necessary sums, leaving Caracas also with the use of the part in Guyana's EEZ which, in any case, never granted its theoretical part of the deposit?

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The article Venezuela contacts gas multinationals to exploit a field that is also in Guyana's waters comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-venezuela-contatta-le-multinazionali-del-gas-per-sfruttare-un-giacimento-che-e-anche-in-acque-della-guyana/ on Sat, 09 Dec 2023 07:00:52 +0000.