(OilPrice.com, Julianne Geiger, 23.Jul.2018) – Guyana’s recoverable offshore oil reserves are larger than expected—by almost a billion barrels, Hess Corp CEO John Hess said in a Monday press release.
Gross discovered recoverable resources for Hess’s Stabroek Block has been revised upward to 4 million barrels of oil equivalent—up from the previous estimate of 3.2 billion barrels.
“The Stabroek Block is a massive world class resource that keeps getting bigger and better,” CEO John Hess said. “Since the end of 2016, the estimate for recoverable resources on the block has quadrupled and we continue to see multi billion barrels of additional exploration potential on the block. We believe the investment opportunity in Guyana has the potential to be transformative for our company and create significant value for our shareholders for many years to come.”
Hess Corp was trading down on Monday, despite the news.
Guyana has been hailed as the world’s most up and coming oil hotspot, as Exxon, Tullow Oil, and Eco Atlantic made remarkable headway in recent years and months.
Exxon, for one, has had multiple finds in Guyana—also in the Stabroek block.
That Guyana—the small South American country sandwiched between troubled Venezuela and Suriname—has oil, and lots of it, is not new. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated oil reserves in the Guyana-Suriname basin somewhere around 15 billion barrels.
The Stabroek block alone is poised to lift Guyana from the status of one of the poorest countries on the continent to untold riches. Nevertheless, its newfound oil wealth may prove to be a stumbling block for the nation who is used to having next-to-nothing to mismanage.
Earlier estimates pegged oil revenues for Guyana at $700 million per year by the late 2020s just from Exxon’s finds alone.
Hess reported earlier that it did not expect to generate a positive cash flow offshore Guyana until about 2022, according to Oil and Gas Investor.
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