For David Granger, it was a good week. Indeed, weeks don’t come a lot better.

Saturday: he was sworn in as president of Guyana, after a long, tough campaign.

Wednesday: ExxonMobil announced Guyana’s first-ever significant oil find. It looks like a biggie.

When Brig Granger was commander of Guyana’s defence force in the 1980s, flour and cheese were all but unobtainable. A handful of ancient Austins and horse-drawn carts trundled the streets of Georgetown.

Now he’s president, will he preside over an oil boom? Later maybe. ExxonMobil’s find could transform Guyana, but not this week. Guyanese daily Kaieteur News reports that former president Donald Ramotar left the Government’s consolidated fund deep in overdraft.

ExxonMobil’s Liza-1 well was spudded on March 5, around 120 miles offshore. ExxonMobil has a 45 per cent stake through its Guyana affiliate; Hess Guyana holds 30 per cent; and 25 per cent is with a subsidiary of China National Offshore Oil Corporation, one of the three big Chinese state-owned oil companies.

Hess and CNOOC replaced Shell, which pulled out some time back. Shell must be kicking itself.

Upstream magazine calls the find “potentially massive.” There are 295 feet of high-quality oil-bearing sandstones in an upper Cretaceous turbidite fan.

A US analyst talks of data from Hess which point to over 1.6 billion barrels of oil in the wider Stabroek block, which includes Liza. That would be twice T&T’s total oil reserves.

But it’s deep—Liza-1 was drilled to almost 18,000 feet in water depths of over 5,700 feet. Costs will be high; to make it commercial, there has to be a lot of oil—particularly at today’s shaky oil price. It will take months of analysis to find whether the sums stack up.

ExxonMobil has a conservative and methodical corporate culture. They won’t rush things. But they do have reserve replacement issues—so if the numbers look good, they will want to pump. 

But when? There’s no infrastructure. To get pipelines and onshore storage in place could take eight years or more. Meanwhile, Guyana has no deepwater port remotely able to take an oil tanker.

There has long been talk of a deepwater harbour at the mouth of the Berbice. A big oil find could provide an impetus. But construction would be a tough call. There are strong offshore currents, with huge pulses of Amazonian silt moving along the coast.

Getting a detailed design would take years. Getting it built could take a decade—and that’s assuming that this challenging piece of marine engineering hits no unforeseen snags.

The fastest way of getting the oil out would be a floating production, storage and offloading vessel, permanently moored over the well and unloading oil onto a tanker.

That might be good news for Petrotrin. There’s no refinery in Guyana; T&T could be the right place to refine smallish tanker-loads of Guyanese oil.

A system like that could be up and pumping a year or two ahead of Guyana’s next election, due by 2020.

David Granger announced a bunch of ministers last Wednesday—but he kept natural resources for himself, within the Office of the President. That was perhaps a disappointment for Rupert Roopnaraine of the Working People’s Alliance, who handled the portfolio ably while in opposition; that’s politics.

At his final rally two days before Guyana’s election, the Brig announced proposals for a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Did he get early wind of ExxonMobil’s find? The PPP’s Robert Persaud had talked of hydrocarbon shows a few days earlier, but in the vaguest of terms.

Besides Liza-1, there are other promising oil prospects offshore from Guyana and Suriname. Upstream magazine reports that ExxonMobil is already lining up its Ranger prospect north-west from Liza-1, with seismic work now under way. That has different geology; it’s an Upper Jurassic limestoney build-up with Lower Tertiary clastic sediments. Repsol and CGX are also due to spud shallower wells this year in their Guyanese blocks.

In Surinamese waters, Apache this year drilled Popokai-1, reportedly with oil shows but no commercial prospects. Petronas is now drilling offshore from Suriname. 

All this looks lovely for Guyana’s new government. For former president Donald Ramotar and the People’s Progressive Party it must be truly galling. They lost power by a margin of one per cent of the votes, just days before a massive oil find.

That may be why they have refused to admit that they lost the vote, fair and square; one reason why they’re in a sulk, threatening protests and legal action. Indeed, former agriculture minister Leslie Ramsammy blames his party’s election loss on ”electoral fraud” linked to “international stakeholders” who are “interested in Guyana’s oil deposits.”

Donald Ramotar did get himself a little fun before the election. He had himself photographed, poring over a table spread with ExxonMobil’s well logs. Those photos were joy to the heart of industry analysts, who ignored dear Donald’s sage features, and zoomed in on the logs themselves, which appear to show four highlighted pay zones, three with oil and one with gas.

For once, the Ramotar government’s communications effort gave some truly informative results.