Pres­i­dent of Exxon­Mo­bil Guyana, Al­is­tair Rout­ledge says the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas will most like­ly not be con­vert­ed to Liq­ue­fied Nat­ur­al Gas (LNG) for ex­port but would be used to fu­el the coun­try’s sev­er­al oth­er growth ar­eas, even as Exxon­Mo­bil pre­pares to even­tu­al­ly de­vel­op its first non-as­so­ci­at­ed gas field here.

He was asked whether the “sev­er­al tril­lion cu­bic feet” of non-as­so­ci­at­ed nat­ur­al gas at Long­tail in the Stabroek Block would be con­vert­ed in­to LNG, but Rout­ledge told re­porters that some of it would be pumped in­to pow­er gen­er­a­tion, da­ta cen­ters, and an alu­mi­na plant, all aimed at boost­ing Guyana’s growth.

He not­ed that in the area of liq­ue­fy­ing the nat­ur­al gas, “we con­tin­ue to hold that as an op­tion” but the fo­cus is on fir­ing up some of those projects that the gov­ern­ment has set its eyes on.

The com­pa­ny hopes to com­plete its en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact stud­ies to­wards the end of 2026 and even­tu­al­ly present its Long­tail field de­vel­op­ment plan (FDP) to the Guyana gov­ern­ment. Af­ter a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion (FID) is made and the project is de­vel­oped, Rout­ledge said the pri­or­i­ty would be to pro­duce con­den­sate (liq­uids as­so­ci­at­ed with nat­ur­al gas) for ex­port glob­al­ly in a man­ner sim­i­lar to crude.

“What we’ve been work­ing with the gov­ern­ment on is to pri­or­i­tize avail­abil­i­ty of gas and sup­ply of gas on­shore in­to the coun­try where it would have the high­est val­ue to the coun­try,” he said.

He said some of the gas would be used to rein­ject in­to the wells to pro­duce the con­den­sate, and it would not be un­til an­oth­er 10 to 15 years af­ter Long­tail’s con­den­sate pro­duc­tion be­gins that nat­ur­al gas would be ex­tract­ed.

“Ini­tial­ly, we will rein­ject all, or al­most all of that gas. What we don’t use as fu­el on the fa­cil­i­ty, in­to the reser­voirs to en­sure that we re­cov­er as much of the liq­uids, par­tic­u­lar­ly in those fields, to con­den­sate, as we pos­si­bly can,” he said.

Mean­while, Rout­ledge, said he be­lieves that three Unit­ed States leg­is­la­tors had been mis­led when thy wrote to the US oil and gas gi­ant re­gard­ing in­for­ma­tion on how its pay­ments to the Guyana gov­ern­ment re­gard­ing the 2016 Stabroek Block Pe­tro­le­um Agree­ment (PA), have af­fect­ed its US fed­er­al tax li­a­bil­i­ty.

In their lengthy cor­re­spon­dence last month, Shel­don White­house of Rhode Is­land, Chris Van Hollen of Mary­land and Jeff Merkley, of Ore­gon, said that af­ter Exxon­Mo­bil dis­cov­ered near­ly 11 bil­lion bar­rels of oil off the coast Guyana, the com­pa­ny signed a PA with the Guyana gov­ern­ment.

“Since the ini­tial Liza oil dis­cov­ery in 2015, Guyana, a for­mer cli­mate leader, has em­braced oil as a route to pros­per­i­ty, even as sea lev­el rise could claim its cap­i­tal, George­town, by 2030.”

The let­ter not­ed that Exxon­Mo­bil part­nered with a Chi­nese state-owned oil com­pa­ny, the Chi­na Na­tion­al Off­shore Oil Cor­po­ra­tion (CNOOC), and the US com­pa­ny Hess, now owned by Chevron, which to­geth­er ex­pect to pump around 900,000 bar­rels of oil a day by the end of 2025.

“Guyana now has the world’s high­est ex­pect­ed oil pro­duc­tion growth through 2035, de­spite el­e­vat­ed sea lev­els and oth­er harms to for­est ecosys­tems and lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties,” they wrote, say­ing that the PA, which was on­ly made pub­lic af­ter sig­nif­i­cant pub­lic pres­sure on the Guyana gov­ern­ment “stip­u­lates that Exxon­Mo­bil can pock­et 75 per cent of the val­ue of oil pro­duced and sold un­til it has re­couped its re­cov­er­able con­tract costs.

They wrote, sub­mit­ting sev­en ques­tions for an­swers re­gard­ing “how the 2016 PA with the Gov­ern­ment of Guyana has af­fect­ed Exxon­Mo­bil’s U.S. fed­er­al tax li­a­bil­i­ty by no lat­er than Oc­to­ber 23, 2025”.

But Rout­ledge told re­porters that “it would ap­pear that OG­GN, per­haps, mis­led the sen­a­tors some­what”.

He said in Exxon­Mo­bil Cor­po­ra­tion’s 2023 and 2024 tax fil­ings, there were no Guyanese tax cred­its in­clud­ed in ei­ther of those fil­ings, “and you would re­call that pri­or to 2023, we were not mak­ing prof­its here in Guyana, so there were no tax cred­its from that. Up un­til this point, there have been no Guyana tax cred­its used by Exxon­Mo­bil”.

Rout­ledge said that Exxon­Mo­bil Guyana is still op­er­at­ing with a neg­a­tive cash flow of around six bil­lion US dol­lars.

“We con­tin­ue to be ac­tu­al­ly cash flow neg­a­tive on an ac­cu­mu­la­tive ba­sis… we are prob­a­bly still around six bil­lion US dol­lars in neg­a­tive cash flow as we look at the cu­mu­la­tive ex­pen­di­tures and cu­mu­la­tive rev­enues that we’ve seen from the Stabroek Block,” he told re­porters. (CMC)