Venezuela-Guyana Feud Halts Exxon Project
24 Décembre 2018 - 12:51AM
Dow Jones News
By Kejal Vyas
An oil exploration ship run by Exxon Mobil Corp. fled after
being intercepted by Venezuela's navy, rekindling a border dispute
between the two nations just as a separate political crisis
threatened Guyana's government.
Owned by Norway's Petroleum Geo-Services and bearing a Bahamian
flag, the seismic-survey vessel was stopped by a Venezuelan Navy
ship Saturday morning in Guyanese waters, about 90 miles from a
provisional border, Guyana said.
PGS and Exxon didn't give further details of the encounter but
said the research ship, which had been acquiring the 3-D seismic
data needed for drilling, stopped work and left with its 70 crew
members. The Venezuelans didn't board the ship, according to its
operators.
Ten offshore oil discoveries since 2015 by an Exxon-led
consortium, accounting for 5 billion barrels of crude, have turned
Guyana, one of South America's poorest nations, into one of the
region's hottest oil frontiers. But the finds have also resurfaced
a simmering, century-old border controversy stemming from
Venezuela's claims of two-thirds of Guyana's territory.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejects this illegal,
aggressive and hostile act," Guyana Foreign Minister Carl Greenidge
said in a statement, calling Venezuela "the real threat to Guyana's
economic development."
The fracas occurred as the government in Georgetown faces a
potentially greater political battle on the domestic front.
Guyana's parliament late Friday approved a no-confidence vote in
the administration of President David Granger, triggering early
elections in March, just as the country prepares for the start of
commercial oil pumping in 2020.
Mr. Granger, who has been out of the public eye since being
diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in November, took office in
2015 with a political coalition promising to tackle corruption and
ending decades of tensions between the descendants of African
slaves and East Indian laborers who make up Guyana's two largest
ethnic groups.
But the government has faced criticism for not renegotiating a
deal that many Guyanese say is too generous to foreign oil partners
and leaves little for the nation's development. Mr. Granger's aides
have defended the deal as the best option for a country with
virtually no experience in the oil industry.
Exxon, meanwhile, said it paused the seismic operations it was
performing under a Guyanese government license. "Our main concern
is for the safety of crew members and others in the area," said a
spokeswoman for the Irving, Texas, company.
Venezuela's Navy approached the research vessel to inform the
crew that they had no authorization work in the area and that their
permit from the Guyanese government was invalid in waters claimed
by Caracas, Venezuela's Foreign Ministry said in a statement. In
the past, President Nicolás Maduro has slammed Exxon's offshore oil
operations in Guyana as a provocation.
The U.S. State Department said that it was monitoring reports of
the interception of the Exxon-hired ship and called on Venezuela to
respect the sovereignty of its neighbors. "Guyana has the sovereign
right to explore and exploit resources in its territorial waters,"
State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said in a
Twitter post.
In recent weeks, the president has made repeated promises to
strengthen Venezuela's military defense as relations fray with the
U.S. and Latin American countries that have largely condemned the
Maduro administration's slide into authoritarian rule.
Mr. Greenidge said he would inform the United Nations of a
breach on his country's national sovereignty.
The crude deposits could be a game changer for Guyana, a former
British colony with less than 800,000 people and an economy
dependent on agriculture, mining and lumber.
Guyana's government, however, says resolving the border dispute
is paramount to its economic aspirations.
A Paris arbitration tribunal in 1899 had set the internationally
recognized border between both countries, but Venezuela 60 years
later rejected the boundary saying it was cheated.
In 2013, Venezuela's navy briefly detained a Malaysian-owned
seafloor survey ship hired by Guyana and the U.S. oil company
Anadarko along with its crew.
Efforts by a U.N. commission to settle the border issue fell
apart earlier this year, leading it to send the case to the
International Court of Justice.
Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 23, 2018 18:36 ET (23:36 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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