"We are hoping that the participants in the auction... will add diversification," Guyana's President, Irfaan Ali, told Reuters in an interview during his visit to the U.S. "There is no blockage against any company."
So far, Guyana's budding oil industry has been dominated by Exxon, which, together with its partners Hess Corp. and China's CNOOC, made a string of more than a dozen discoveries in the Stabroek block offshore Guyana. The total reserves of crude oil tapped so far have been estimated at some 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
As a result of these discoveries, Guyana's oil production has been rising steadily, and so has government revenue from it. According to a recent Rystad Energy report, Guyana's government could soon pass the $1-billion threshold in oil revenues, with those reaching as much as $7.5 billion by 2030.
Guyana is currently producing less than half a million barrels of oil daily but has plans to boost this to 1.2 million bpd by 2027. This would make it a bigger producer than Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
The country is in talks with investment companies from the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, to participate in the development of its oil and gas resources.
Meanwhile, the tiny South American nation has turned into the world's hottest oil discovery spot, with Rystad reporting that since 2015, some 11.2 billion barrels of crude oil equivalent have been discovered in Guyana, representing 18 percent of all the hydrocarbon resources discovered globally in the period and 32 percent of the oil discoveries made globally in the period.
By 2035, the country could be producing 1.7 million bpd, Rystad analysts also said in their report, which would make it the world's fourth-largest offshore oil producer, bigger than Norway, the United States, and Mexico.
