The Canadian oil company, CGX Energy Inc, through its Guyanese subsidiary ON Energy Inc, has resumed its search for oil, but this time on land. The area it is exploring covers some 377,500 acres and is adjacent to the offshore area for which it holds an exploration licence. It covers the area between Mara, West Bank Berbice to Skeldon on the Corentyne coast.
In June 3, 2000, Surinamese gunboats evicted a CGX oil rig from its drilling position within Guyana’s maritime borders. The Guyana and Suriname governments are locked in discussions about how to jointly exploit and manage the resources of the area to which Suriname is claiming as its own, pending the determination of the maritime border between the two countries.
A release from its Canadian headquarters yesterday, quotes CGX’s President and CEO, Kerry Sully as saying, “While offshore exploration continues to be postponed by CGX and the other operators in the basin because of overlapping border claims by Suriname, none of the Berbice Block is affected by the overlapping claims.”
Last night Sully told Stabroek News that the company had been looking at the Staatsloie on-shore operations at Tambaredjo, which was about 200 kilometres east of its concession, and saw no reason to doubt that there were hydrocarbon deposits on the CGX concession. Staatsolie estimates Tambaredjo has 900 million barrels of oil in place, of which 173M barrels are recoverable. The CGX release said that some of Staatsolie’s most promising lands were in the Nickerie area, across the Corentyne River from its concession.
ON Energy Inc, which was registered locally on September 10, lists as directors Canadians, Sully, who is its chairman, and Warren Workman its president. The Guyanese directors are New-York based Dr Edris (Kamal) Dookie and John Lewis. Edward Luckhoo of Luckhoo & Luckhoo is the company’s Corporate Secretary.
The decision to conduct the exploration was prompted by the field reconnaissance, Workman conducted in July and from which he concluded that the geological features made it an attractive exploration area.
The release said that the Oklahoma-based US company, Geo-Microbial Technologies (GMT) would begin conducting geo-chemical sampling. This uses specialised methodologies to evaluate the presence of microbes in the soil that feed on trace hydrocarbons escaping along micro-seeps from sub-surface deposits.
“If micro-seepages of hydrocarbons are identified, additional financing will be secured to acquire seismic readings to define structure and stratigraphic traps over the anomalies. CGX plans to tap local and regional financing for the exploration exercise.
“Seismic acquisition will be very focused in areas of significant geo-chemical anomalies, reducing the cost normally associated with exploratory seismic surveys covering a broad area.”
The release added that if the 2-D seismic programme identified drillable traps, the third phase would be the drilling of several exploration wells.