PARAMARIBO: Guyana, Suriname should partner on shorebase to cut costs – Suriname’s New Oil Boss

PARAMARIBO: With the aim of cutting the costs on a state-of-the-art shore base facility, the acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Managing Director of Suriname’s Staatsolie, Annand Jagesar, says that Guyana and Suriname should partner on this project.

Jagesar made this call during his presentation at the Guyana Basins Summit – a virtual three-day Oil and Gas conference. This conference, which concluded yesterday, was aimed at delivering networking opportunities and valuable insight into the region’s potential, along with its challenges and the road ahead.

For the readers’ enlightenment, a shore base is an onshore support facility that provides services to the oil companies during drilling, development, maintenance and producing operations. These services include handling waste management, chemical storage, warehousing, construction, berthing of supply vessels, cargo marshaling area, loading and offloading, supply chain management, expatriate management, and custom services.

The acting CEO indicated to listeners that the shore base is very important, and implored President, Irfaan Ali, to hold a discussion on this project with the Surinamese government.
In highlighting one of the needs for the partnership on this project, Jagesar explained, “This is the problem with Suriname and Guyana, we have all these mud banks that come out of the Amazon river, and just to reach water depths of ten meters or more, you have to go about 30-40 to even 60 meters out of the coastal areas.”

Due to this, it makes it very expensive to construct a shore base, Jagesar said, and if Guyana and Suriname work together on it, both countries would split the costs by two.
“We’re really looking forward to talking about this in the future,” the acting CEO said, “This is also an opportunity for interested parties to look at the shore base development and the most likeable is that we do it together with Guyana.”

Jagesar’s comments come on the heels of Staatsolie’s former CEO, Rudolf Elias, who had first called for Guyana and Suriname to partner on establishing a shore base. Elias, during a January interview with Kaieteur Radio, had warned that if the two neighbouring countries fail in building these shore bases together, then it would lose local content to countries like Trinidad and the United States.

Notably, Guyana’s Shore Base Inc. (GYSBI) located at Houston is unable to handle the Liza One demands. The former Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman, had revealed this in 2018, in a parliamentary sectorial committee.

He had said to that committee in 2018, “What we have at Muneshwers Limited, now, which is already causing major traffic accidents and traffic jams every day, is only to service the Liza One field. The Liza One field has approximately 1.8 billion barrels of oil because it is going to be tied with another field, Payara. We are still talking about another two to three billion barrels of oil that would have to be developed.”