Canadian oil company Frontera’s recent payment of a US$33 million signing bonus for a 33% working interest in two blocks offshore Guyana without any confirmed commercial quantities of oil, should signal to government how much it lost when it renegotiated its Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) with ExxonMobil’s subsidiary in 2016 and got a mere US$18 million.
So says former Petroleum Advisor to the government Jan Mangal who pointed out that when government renegotiated the PSA with ExxonMobil’s subsidiary Esso Exploration & Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL), and partners back in 2016, the company already boasted confirmed reserves of over 1.4 billion barrels of oil.