ExxonMobil Guyana President, Rod Henson, will be leaving Guyana in the coming months to take up a new post as Vice President, Wells, for ExxonMobil in Houston, with responsibility for all drilling activities around the world.
In a press release issued on Wednesday, the company stated that Henson, who was assigned to head the Guyana operations in 2017, will be replaced by Alistair Routledge, current President and General Manager for ExxonMobil Qatar Limited.
“Alistair is very well suited to take our work in Guyana to the next level given his years of experience heading up ExxonMobil’s operations in Qatar,” Henson was quoted in the release as saying.
During Henson’s tenure, he presided over a number of important operational milestones, including the production of Guyana’s first oil in December 2019. ExxonMobil Guyana has grown from 21 employees in 2017 to 156 at the end of the first quarter of 2020, more than 55 percent of whom are Guyanese.
The total number of persons supporting ExxonMobil Guyana’s activities is now more than 4,200 with 2,200 of these being Guyanese. Since 2015, more than GY $52 Billion was spent directly with Guyanese suppliers for a variety of services ranging from foodstuff to engineering.
“This has been the best and most rewarding job I have ever had,” said Henson, who has worked in several countries during his 30-year career.
“Guyana is a great country with amazing people, and I was privileged to have an awesome team that made my time here truly rewarding,” Henson was quoted in the release as saying.
To date, Exxon has made 16 discoveries at the Stabroek Block amounting to more than 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent resources.
Guyana lifted its first million barrels of profit oil in February, with oil tanker Cap Philippe transporting it from the Liza Destiny Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel and received its first payment the next month.
The past few months have been a trying time for Exxon and the oil industry in general, however. Only recently, ExxonMobil had announced that it would seek to scale down its operations in the wake of the global uncertainty in financial markets caused by COVID-19.
