We interrupt this program to bring you a breaking near story.
US oil giant Exxon strikes oil in Guyana.
Now one of the prominent election issues in Guyana has been the country's oil exploration efforts.
They were rumors swirling that Ganna had found oil.
Sound like almost all its neighbors, Guyana is not yet an oil producer, but last week Eggxon Mobil announced it had discovered oil off the coast.
In May twenty fifteen, Exon Mobil announced that it had struck oil off the coast of the small South American country of Guyana. And in Guyana, this was a big deal, And then just a couple months later, Exon was making headlines for another reason entirely. An investigation is underway into Exon, the huge oil company married research about the effects of
climate change. Reports suggests more than thirty years ago, Exon's own scientists were taking climate change projections into account in its operational plans.
Exon was on the cutting edge of science.
They wanted to be on the cutting edge of science.
Forty years ago, on climate.
Change journalists at Inside Climate News, the La Times, and Columbia Journalism School published dozens of internal documents that showed that Exon Mobile had been warned by its own scientists about climate change back in the nineteen seventies, and yet had worked hard to keep the world from ever hearing those warnings or taking them seriously. Exon rushed to defend its record. It criticized the journalists. It ran tons of social media ads and videos that would pop up every
time you searched Exon climate on Google. It claimed the whole story was part of an organized plat against it. But it was hard to deny the hundreds of internal documents that the company itself had put in its corporate archive at the University of Texas Library. It was all there, in black and white, predictions of warming temperatures, rising seas, fires and hurricanes, models and charts that showed exactly what we're dealing with today. Story after story painted Exon as
the world's climate villain. And it was at this moment that Guyana, a country on the frontlines of the global climate crisis and one of the few South American nations to stay out of oil throughout its history, emerged as a new oil state thanks to Exxon. As time went on, Exon began projecting that oil from Guyana would make up around twenty five percent of its total global output, so
to recap. The same year Exxon was exposed for blocking climate policy for decades, they decided to start a whole new project doing offshore drilling in Guyana, a project so large that it's what climate experts call a carbon bomb. Knowing everything they know about climate change and the role of fossil fuels planet, knowing the inevitability of oil spills and flaring and things going wrong. Not in the nineteen seventies when they were just learning about these things, but
now when they know so much. That's when they decided to expand into Guyana.
One of the first things we found it was who was this company that found this oil? And they said, oh, it was EEPGLSO Exploration and Production Gata Limited, and that company is a subsidiary of Exxon Mobile Corporation.
Keanu Wilberg reports on the oil and gas industry for one of the country's top papers, Kit News.
And so I said, okay, we need to let people know, yes, we found oil, but who are we really dealing with. Who is this company? What's his track record? We don't know anything about it. Let's get into it.
I'm Amy Westervelt, and I'm a journalist who's been covering the fossil fuel industry for twenty years, so it was a big surprise to me that Keana and her colleagues had not heard of Exxon Mobile before this. In the US, of course, they're a household name, but for journalists in particular, they have a reputation. For me and every journalist I know who's ever done an excellon story, weird shit just
happens when you're reporting on this company. When I was interviewing those former excellent scientists I mentioned before, the ones that had done all that climate research back in the seventies and eighties, every time I traveled, half my reservations would somehow wind up changed or canceled. It actually happened when I was reporting on this story too. On my way to Guyana, I got a message just before my flight that my hotel room in Georgetown had been canceled.
I called our senior producer and editor, Sarah Ventry about it to let her know.
Good morning, Sarah. I woke up to a fun little surprise that Marriott had.
Canceled my hotel reservation tonight.
I totally forgot that, like every time I go somewhere to report on Exxon, this happens. We asked Keana if intimidation from either the oil companies or the government.
Ever makes her think twice about her beat.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember uh watching this documentary about how citizens of Papua New Guinea died when they were pushing for an oil and gas project in a particular area. People who were protesting against it started disappearing. But I am I am very very much aware of the dangers of reporting on the oil and gas sector.
Those dangers have only increased in the few years since Guyana became an oil country. For decades now, the fossil fuel industry's story has been that oil equals development and prosperity, equality, stability, a better quality of life. As the world's fossil fuel companies race to tap the last of the planet's oil reserves, we have a chance to examine that promise up close in real time this season Life and Death in the world's fastest growing economy. The purpose of an oil company
is to make money. They have no other purpose.
If you have abundant natural source and you could use those natural resources in a very responsible manner to help lift your people out of poverty. That's what I support.
It's really extraordinary the leverage the industry has over the country, and it's inexplicable the amount.
A number of attacks we have received from members of the government. It shows that the government is not ready to accommodate persons who are willing to speak out.
One point two billion gallons of suite in our Christine Ocean, so will be getting roughly again.
The ship for every battel of oil they take out. That's the deal. In a nutshell.
I thought it was hard to report on the CIA, and I came to understand that Exon was far more difficult and a little bit scarier even.
Welcome to Light Sweet Crude, a special crossover season of Drilled and Damages. Stay with us.
My lifelong dream since since growing up was to be a teacher.
This is Keana Wilberg, who we heard from before. She was one of my first connections in Guyana. Actually, I originally hired her to help do some interviews and some on the ground recording when we couldn't travel to Guyana because of COVID. But the more I got to know her, I realized that she wasn't just helping us to tell this story. She was a big part of it.
And I didn't get to fulfill that dream because I was told that I was too young and the boys in the class would not take me seriously as a teacher. So I said, Okay, what's the next thing that I wanted to do, and that would be writing. I loved her and I love to pray as well, so I remember praying and I said, you know, God, if you channel me in the direction.
To get a job that allows me to do what I love, so that allows me to write, I'm going to give one thousand percent of myself every singly.
The next day, I.
Got this job. This job was working as a reporter at one of the country's largest newspapers, Kit News. She was young, nineteen maybe twenty, and she had no idea what to expect. She stayed up all night before her first day studying the paper and its writers.
So I had a little notebook and I wrote down all of the topics that they paid attention to in health and crime and education, because I wasn't sure where they would put me or what they would ask me.
She even picked out the perfect first day of work outfit, just like you used to do the night before your first day of school.
I remember having this black jacket with gold buttons and matching green inner top, the black pants with green shoes, and when I got to wear I thought that I looked so good.
But it turned into one of her first lessons about navigating Guyana's political landscape as a journalist.
I got to work the first day and I was reprimanded for it because green and black are party colors. It's the two colors of one of the major political parties in the country. If you go out there as a reporter, they automatically ask you, oh, are you are representative of this party.
That's a big deal in Guyana, where politics are tense and racialized.
You have predominantly Blocks and you have predominantly Indians, and they are parties that represent those interests.
Leading up to elections, you will see both sides reminding of things that happen five years ago, ten years ago.
Fifty years ago. You will hear them beating these racist drums like every single time it's leading up to elections. And so unfortunately, even at this media entity, when it gets to that time, you see some people say good afternoon, and some people don't.
According to Keana, oil drilling has exacerbated the problem.
It's more cut throat and there's no apology. There's no apology for it. There's no care for window dressing anymore. It's going to be violet, it's going to be disrespectful. It's oil is just making this the politics. It's getting toxic. It's written an extremely toxic level.
That's pretty concerning in a country with a history of political battles turning violent. The fact that politics are turning ugly in the wake of oil doesn't exactly bode well for stability in Guyana. Americans are of course, no strangers to divisive, toxic, racialized, or even violent politics either. But to give you just one example of just how bad it's starting to get in Guyana, Keana told us about a fight over one piece of oil related legislation that
actually ended up in a wrestling match. Seriously, some politicians ended up rolling around on the floor of the National Assembly.
Real the thing now on presidented vulgarity in the National Assembly Bana.
The opposition resorted to whistling, stealing the mace and that instrument. If it's removed from there, you cannot pass a law. So the opposition tried to steal the mace so that they can pass it.
And it was.
A tug of war between the members of the opposition and the parliamentary officials and their images online with a parliamentary official lyne on the ground hugging the mace so that it cannot be stolen from him.
That sort of thing has been happening more and more in the past couple of years as Excellent started actually producing barrels of oil. Suddenly the potential for oil profits has become real money in government accounts. Roads are being built, government programs are being announced. Guyana's capital, Georgetown, it's an oil boomtown now that caters to foreigners in the oil business. There are high rise hotels springing up all over the place.
It's impossible to get a reservation at the most popular restaurant in town. Old colonial homes near the waterfront have been torn down and replaced by modern apartment buildings or condos where oil execs from Houston rotate in and out. Competition for power and wealth has intensified, turning up the heat on long simmering political, ethnic and class resentments. When that first announcement was made in twenty fifteen. It was
just the earliest hint of what was to come. Exon had figured out that there was oil off Guyana's coast, but it needed to understand exactly how much how accessible it was. Once that was determined, it had to commission unusually large and complex offshore rigs to get at the oil. These were not your standard offshore platforms. Exon needed to be able not only to drill in extremely deep water, but also to store large quantities of oil at sea and ship barrels directly from the middle of the ocean.
It takes at least two years to build these things. They're called floating production, storage and Offloading vessels, or as we heard a lot of people call them FPSOs. They cost up to three billion dollars each and they can take up to a year just to install and get going. So it makes sense that while Exon announced that it had discovered oil in Guyana in twenty fifteen, it didn't
actually produce its first barrel there until twenty nineteen. When that happened, the country's president at the time, David Granger, was so thrilled he declared the day a national holiday.
Guy needs I should issue a proclamation declaring the twentieth of December as National Petroleum Day.
In those four years from the discovery of oil to the production of it, Keanu Wilberg set herself the task of learning everything she possibly could about the industry and about the company that Guyana was partnering with.
I distinctly remember I said, Okay, you know what, I don't know anything about oil and gas. I'm editor in chief at the TAME. Adam Harris said, you know, I have a book somewhere at home about Exxon.
The book was one of the all time masterpieces ever written about Exon Private Empire.
I'm Steve Call and I am the author of Private Empire, Exxon Mobile, and American Power.
Steve Call is also an investigative journalist for The New Yorker.
I thought it was hard to report on the CIA, and I came to understand that Exon was far more difficult and a little bit scarier. Even I joked with my colleagues that, you know, if I disappeared, like if some van pulled up beside me on the street and I was bundled away and they never saw me again, that it wouldn't be al Qaeda, which I had reported on it wouldn't be the CIA, which I had reported,
I'd probably be excellent. They have that way of creeping people out of intimidation actually, and it's it's a strategy, and they're very practiced at it and effective at it. They have a lot of power and resources with which to intimidate people.
Keanu photocopied Calls book for her colleagues. Reading it, she could tell she was signing up for a big challenge, but it wasn't all on her shoulders. Her paper, Kitter News knew that Guyana getting into the oil business was a big deal, so they created an oil and gas desk and put five journalists on it, some for oil, some for gas. They all read those photocopies of Private Empire and then came up with questions they wanted answers for.
Everyone was armed with pencils and exercise books, notebooks, and we were writing on all the questions that we want to ask, that we want to find out and do research a book.
As they did their research, they would publish it in a series of weekly articles.
And we started out with everything you need to know about Excel Mobile, and some of our stories looked at the environmental issues concerns that countries civil society groups had about exelmobiles operations.
One of those concerns was, unsurprisingly, climate change and the extent to which a massive new oil project would be exacerbating a problem that the country and the world is already facing. Dianese President your Fanali has painted sort of a robbing Peter to pay Paul picture, claiming that oil money will help Guyana pay for the cost of adapting to climate change, never mind that it will also exacerbate the problem. And Guyana's capital, Georgetown, is below sea level already.
In fact, it was already below sea level when it was built. Back in the late seventeen hundreds. The Dutch colonized the area and engineered a canal system for Georgetown, similar to those they built in the Netherlands.
Now there are hundreds and hundreds of these in Guyana, all along the coast. So you have the sea wall, but they're breaks in the sea wall all along that has these openings. That has a sluice, so it's like a gate that opens and closes, so at low tide it's open to let water out. At high tide it's closed to keep the seawater out.
Salvador to Carries was born and raised in Guyana. Today he worked as a tour guide there.
And right now even there are parts of the east coast, and even here during spring tides you should see the waves coming over the top of the wall. So any kind of rise in sea level, we're in trouble. How much do you keep building this wall up? At some point we're going to have to think about moving, and the government is already talking about it, actually moving the capital back into where the big airport is.
I was walking around with this yesterday. Someone was like, man, why are you walking around with that brooksh.
When we got to Guyana, we didn't just head straight for the oil and gas experts and for a drive by of the Exxon headquarters. We wanted to understand the context all these changes were happening in, so we went to the market, we talked to fishermen at the seawall, and we hit the National Museum with Salvador. It turns out the Dutch and the British weren't the only colonial
powers interested in Guyana back in the seventeen hundreds. The French, Spanish and Portuguese all took parts of the country too.
You got the true Guanas and what they used to call British Guiana.
Dutch Guiana and French Guiana.
Dutch Guiana is surnam is.
Here and Spanish Cana was here and they are Naco.
Spanish Guana became part of Venezuela. Portuguese Ganda became part of Brazil. So you've got French, no French, Dutch and English. But the border got changed.
At this point, Salvador stood in front of a big map of the country to show how these former colonies had been divided into new countries.
Brazil and we gave all of this to Venezuela. Sonaudi claimed that this should be border. So two turds again, they say it belongs to them.
Na, no way, sorry, here.
Not happening.
In case you missed that, he's saying that Venezuela is laying claim to a portion of Guyana. In fact, they lay claim to a fairly large percentage of Guyana's land and also to all of its offshore area, which means the oil. That border dispute has been going on for more than a century, but the twenty fifteen discovery of oil in Guyana reignited it. By that point, Venezuela had actually kicked out several foreign oil companies, including Exonmobile.
The reason why we are famous, no is that Venezuela La has denied, denied the US companies there rightful share.
Whatever that.
Maybe this is Alfred Boulai, an engineer and energy expert in Guyana, who says there have been various research projects around oil in the country for decades. Today he works for Transparency Institute Guyana, which pushes for increased government transparency.
So I knew it was oil being healed, and certain knowledgeable people knew yet, particularly mister Borlam in the nineteen seventies, the Coamo.
President, that's former President Forbes Burnham. The country officially gained independence from Britain in nineteen sixty six, but it didn't have its first entirely democratic election until the early nineties. In the lead up to independence, the most popular party was the People's Progressive Party the PPP, and at that point in the sixties it was a cross racial party led by two men, one of Indian descent, Chetty Jagon,
the other of African descent Forbes Burnham. Like a lot of other South American political leaders at the time, they were both leftists, and they had strong opinions about who should own and benefit from Guyana's natural resources, not Western oil companies. For one, they wanted Guyana's resources to benefit
its people. Also, like a lot of South American countries, Guyana was on the CIA's radar at the time, and they had strong opinions about which of these two men they'd prefer to see in charge of so many resources. Burnham the one who didn't spend quite so much time with Fidel Castro as they have done in so many countries. The CIA leaned on racial differences to split the parties
into two and then backed Burnham. Despite its relative stability compared to some of its neighbors, Guyana wasn't a big target for its oil because it sat beneath the ocean floor some forty miles off the coast. So from the nineteen seventies to the early two thousands, the big US oil companies were really concentrating on Venezuela.
So I am absolutely sure that they knew they was always there and just waited Venezuela is going to play bad. Then they said, well, okay, we have oil elsewhere, and then negotiated a very sweet deal. So the people who knew about oil knew these things, but the general public didn't.
Boo I thinks it's possible that Venezuela and Guyana's oil are fed by the same reserve, which could be further fueling Venezuela's attempts to stop the drilling in Guyana. All of this got Keana Wilberg and her team at KIT News thinking about one key question that they had not been able to find an answer to about Exxon's sudden presence in Guyana.
The contract that we have with this company.
Steve Call's book Private Empire is filled with details about what kinds of deals countries like Equatorial Guinea, Chad, and Guyana's neighbor Venezuela had struck with Exon In twenty sixteen, a year after Exon discovered oil offshore. Keana and her newsroom wanted to know where Guyana stood compared to those other countries. Equatorial Guinea had only gotten about eight percent
royalties in its contract, Chad got ten percent. But Guyana was more stable and developed than those countries had been when they inked contracts with Exxon. Surely they would get more.
And it took us a year of writing over and over and over and over. They released a contract, release a contract release, release.
It next time on light sweet crude.
This is something that was hidden from media since nineteen ninety nine.
No one saw this document.
The majority of people, including the IMF, have gone on record as saying it was a very unfair deal for the ENA.
I began talking to someone there and he said he would like to do a case, but nobody would do the case for him to challenge the oil, and I said, I'll do it.