ExxonMobil is looking to replicate Guyana’s oil and gas boom off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, the company’s head of exploration said, as it pursues expansion in the basin to the east of Venezuela.
The oil and gas giant has found success in developing one of the world’s largest oilfields offshore from neighbouring Guyana, as the biggest shareholder in the Stabroek block.
“A lot of people ask, ‘well, where’s the next Guyana?’” John Ardill, vice-president — head of global exploration, said in an interview. “In Trinidad, we moved in as a play extension to Guyana.”
Development in Trinidad and Tobago was occurring at a much faster pace than in Guyana, said Ardill. Exxon had negotiated a production-sharing agreement with the government within seven months “which is about half as long as it usually takes on a good day.”
It typically took about a year to secure a vessel to begin acquiring seismic data over a prospect. In Trinidad and Tobago, however, the process was completed in just six months, he said. “That’s a record time,” he added.
The government of the dual-island nation this year aligned itself with the Trump administration in officially recognising Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez, seen as paving the way for greater energy co-operation.
BP, Shell, and the government of Trinidad and Tobago are pursuing cross-border agreements with Caracas and Washington to supply the country’s LNG industry with Venezuelan gas.
The southern Caribbean nation has also attempted to build a tourist economy to supplement its dependence on the oil and gas sector, which began when its first oil well was drilled in 1857. Crude output peaked in the late 1970s and has fallen steadily, with a shift to gas and petrochemicals since the 1990s.
A revival of Trinidad and Tobago’s oil industry could ease the strain on the country’s finances, which have been hit by shortages of LNG feedstocks in recent years. BP and Shell each own 45 per cent of Atlantic LNG, the main gas export plant, with the remainder held by the state-owned National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago.
Ardill said Exxon would make a decision on where to drill its first well by mid-2027. “If we’re successful with that well, we can deploy the Guyana development model — which is extremely fast — and we also have the AI tools developed in Guyana.” The US oil major sees its success in Guyana as vindication of its strategy to keep investing in exploring for oil and gas even when some competitors stepped back.
Exxon and its partners committed $60bn to developing Guyana’s resources in pursuit of growth after striking oil in 2015, with offshore oil and gas development typically more expensive than tapping onshore fields.
The fifth floating production, storage and offloading vessel, which processes and stores oil from seabed wells before transferring it to tankers, arrived in Guyanese waters in August. Ardill said Exxon was looking to apply the techniques it has used in the US to other shale-rich areas around the world.
Exxon had taken delegations from Azerbaijan and Algeria to the Permian Basin to demonstrate how the company operates such projects, he added.
“The big exploration play is to take what we’ve developed in the Permian, and replicate it somewhere like Azerbaijan or Algeria,” Ardill said. “Azerbaijan would be an oil play, Algeria’s a gas play, but these are huge, absolutely world-class.” (Financial Times)
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