Guyana, It's Glen again, tiktoking.
I am on TikTok again, ticktak.
I'm here to tickle you guys again.
This is Glenn Law. He's the publisher of the newspaper Keana Wilberg works for Kitter News. He is not your average publisher. And I'm not just talking about his penchant for statement hats and snazzy shirts.
A change my short. I had a while Toby off this man.
If you watch Law's videos, you will be seeing him in different clothes, different shoes, and with glittering jewelry. But Law isn't just a larger than life character. He's also an influencer. He has more than twenty thousand followers on TikTok and he's a content machine. He puts out a video almost every day.
Glen again, tiktoking.
It's Friday, Glenn ticking you, but this time I'm taking you guys differently.
Lots of his videos have over one hundred thousand views. That's a pretty big number in a country with fewer than eight hundred thousand residents. And Glenn Law hosts a show on YouTube that he broadcasts on Kit's radio station. A newspaper a radio show, a YouTube channel, tiktoks. It's kind of a lot, but it's all part of a strategy. Law doesn't just want to put information out into the world. He wants to reach the masses and he knows how to speak their language. Literally, it's a.
Version of Patois called Kreoles, so it's English and we have our own lingo that's mixed into that.
That's Keana Wilberg, the journalist from Lall's newspaper Kitter News that we heard from last time. She says most people in Guyana, and especially working class people, speak Creolis. We heard it a lot too, like when our taxi driver took us to get some typical Guyanese snacks on the way to the Kijer News office.
It's hot. It's hot, very hot, too hot. No, it's ara much.
You said you didn't need it.
I don't eat I eat it one a mistake?
That does that? Does it?
Kind of does it? Kind of take me experience. They're going to explore an experience like that for no Miwanaka and peple not too hot.
I'm not sure if you caught that, but we were talking about eating some of Guyana's famously spicy peppers and our driver was speaking in rapid fire creoles.
So we report the news and that's for.
Middle class and then that is translated into a written column that we have called them boise and then mister Glenlow he would also use his platform to do an extended version of that.
This strategy of speaking to people in a way they understand and relate to it makes a big difference, especially when you're talking about complicated, messy things like oil contracts. Remember the team at kit News was waiting for months for the government to release its contract with ExxonMobil. Finally at the end of twenty seventeen, they did December twenty eighth, twenty seventeen. To be exact, Christmas is a very special moment for Guyanese and it's.
A period that the government knows if it wants to rush anything that needs careful attention, they put it at Christmas, which is what they did.
Ah.
Yes, the classic news dump. Every government and corporation in the world knows this tactic. If you're releasing news you're not super proud of or that you suspect might have some backlash, you put it out on a Friday evening before a long weekend or during a big sporting event, or in the week between Christmas and New Year's but this wasn't just any news jump.
Finally, the government said, okay, at six o'clock today, we're going to release the contract. So Eggxon decided to bowl a press conference just about two or three hours before that.
That was the first press conference Exon had in Guyana, and they've hosted very few since then. But this contract was really complicated and full of legal eese, so Exon decided they would break it down for reporters and point them toward the most important bits helpful.
It was in a boardroom at the Marriot Hotel, right, and my colleagues and I we left. Everyone is down serious and for the first time, because we normally don't like to share our angles, but this was the first time everybody was huddled together.
Did you understand what.
This guy was talking about? What is this?
What did he mean by this? Did he really say this?
And I'm talking about season journalists, journalists who've been in this game for like twenty thirty years, covering so much here and abroad, and they were confused. And my editor in chief, who was during the time, he was saying, you know, this is this is exactly what this press conference is intended to do.
Remember, the contract still wasn't going to be released for another few hours, so everything Exon told these reporters at the press conference it was just like a heads up before anyone could actually read it, you know, just fyi. Then a few hours later, the government did release the contract and it was chaos.
This is something that was hidden from media since nineteen ninety nine.
Nineteen ninety nine was the year Guyana first signed a contract with Exxon Mobile. Then it was revised in twenty sixteen after oil was discovered.
No one saw this document. No one even knew what certain terms meant. Nobody didn't understand what what what is two percent royalty? What is fifty to fifty profit oil? What is profit oil? What is cost oil? And they're talking to us with all of these different terms, and the conversation just went over everybody's head.
So the contract was unintelligible to anyone who hadn't spent years reading oil contracts. And to make things even more confusing, Exon had primed everyone with information. They wanted people to know parts of the contract. They wanted to point people's attention toward. No one could make heads or tails of it or tell what was really going on. In fact, it would take you years for local lawyers and international experts to wrap their heads around what exactly this contract
laid out. As everyone did start to make their way through it, one by one, they came to the same conclusion.
The majority of people, including the IMF, has gone on record as.
Saying it was a very unfair deal for.
The Vienna, a historically bad, profoundly bad contract that the government got with Exxon.
It's a balance of power problem.
Once the contract assigned, then one of Excellon's sort of playbooks is to refuse to renegotiate.
That was head of the Transparency Institute of Guyana Frederick Collins, investigative journalist Antonio Juhas, and journalist Steve call who wrote about Excellent Mobile in his book Private Empire. One by one, environmental nonprofits, government corruption groups, and the International Monetary Fund came out saying this was a bad deal for Guyana.
When I asked Exon about it, they sent me the following statement quote, our Guyana operation is in what's considered a frontier offshore exploration basin the terms of our petroleum agreement with the government of Guyana are common in the industry and competitive with other countries at a similar stage of resource discovery. But even some conservative pro oil voices have been pointing out major flaws in the contract, which begs the question is this oil boom actually gonna make
Guyana rich? We'll get into it after this quick break. This is light, sweet crude, and I'm Amy Westervelt.
Ladies and gentlemen, for a pleasure to welcome you to Georgetown, Guyana.
Please remain seated with your seatbelt securely fastened until we are partipicate.
If the Captain turns.
Off the fast and seatbelt side, please love check.
When we landed in Guyana, one thing was very apparent. Government officials were hesitant to talk to us. A few ministers and even the Vice President's scheduler had gotten back to us about the interviews, but then gone very very quiet. Then people kept asking us one question over and over. Had we seen the Vice News story on Guyana?
Guyana is one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
Is the Chinese that are building this right?
Yes?
But these deals have come with claims of corruption. Do you accept bribes?
No?
I don't were a new reporters come from abroad.
They always want to make a developing country leader look corrupt.
In June twenty two, Vice News aired a damning piece on corruption in Guyana. Journalists went undercover, posing as a Chinese businessman who was interested in investing in the country and his secretary. They met with various Chinese businessmen who claimed to be middlemen for bribing government officials, particularly the Vice President Barat Jugdeo. One man in particular, mister Sue, claimed to have handled a deal between the oil company
and Jack Dao. He took the undercover journalist to see the Vice president at his home as a way to show them that he did have this close relationship with him. Jagdeo never spoke of bribes, but he did say that he was good friends with mister Sue and could help their project from the government side.
Can you understand how with Theo in detail, I'm.
Not getting involved business, you will get his support.
Sus my friend he at all his soon beans, with all it raiment.
I don't, I don't I understand. I understand.
The thing is that my thing is invoment. So you can either assist from.
Goloments after that story came out, Jagdeo's sued mister Sue for defamation in Guyana. He claimed fifty million dollars in damages and he seems to have stopped talking to foreign journalists altogether, at least for a while. A lot of people look at the contract situation in Guyana and think it must be corruption. In fact, Jagdeo himself accused the previous government, the one that actually signed this contract, of corruption.
Now those accusations are flying at him too, after being a vocal critic of the contract for years and promising to renegotiate it when his government resumed power. Now Jagdeo says renegotiation is not an option. He often repeats a phrase that Exon has used over and over, Santa Kiyev contract, Santa Ti of contract, sanctity of contract. Contract renegotiation has become a big issue in Guyana. Government officials are still answering questions about it years later, and Glenlaw is turning
out hundreds of hours of video on the topic. To understand why, we're going to have to get into some of the details and spoiler alert, they are confusing as hell to recap. Guyana signed a contract with Exon Mobile in nineteen ninety nine, allowing them to explore for oil, but Exon didn't really start exploring there until about a decade later, and then in twenty fifteen they struck oil, and a year later, in twenty sixteen, they inked a
new contract with the government of Guyana. According to Exon, even though they had found oil, no one knew the full potential of Guyana's reserves at the time, but none of that was made public until December twenty seventeen, when Exeon held a press conference to explain the contract to journalists like Keana Wilberg.
It's clear that they weren't exactly telling us lies, but they weren't telling us the truth.
Eider. This practice using statements that are technically true but also leave out critical information in order to mislead people. It has a name paltering, and the fossil fuel industry uses it over and over again. John Cook is a climate communications researcher at Monash University in Australia and an advisor to Facebook on climate misinformation. He says paltering is
a key tactic for the industry. He often points to the way fossil fuel companies talk about renewable energy as a text book example, the.
Sun doesn't shine at night or the wind doesn't always fly, and therefore or renewables on a reliable source of energy.
Of course, it's true that the wind doesn't always blow and that the sun doesn't shine at night, but this argument intentionally leaves out information about things like battery storage that address those issues. Exceon Mobile does the same thing
in Guyana. In fact, the company uses a handful of classic disinformation tactics all the time, not just pultering, but also implying that any information not released by the company itself is inaccurate and something called building social license things like sponsoring sporting events or educational programs to convince the public that the company is a positive member of the community.
These three tactics have been deployed over and over again in Guyana, not just at that initial press conference, but in a steady stream of marketing materials the company has released since then, like this promotional video they put out on Facebook to explain the contract to the Guyanese public.
I'm Janelle Persad and I'm Mikaela Careron. So while development activities continue to progress at a rapid pace. There are still many of you out there who have questions, questions specifically about the production sharing agreement or the contract which was signed in twenty sixteen. And if you guys hadn't heard, Exon Mobil will once again be sponsoring the Guyana Amazon Warriors Cricket Cricket Lovely Titanti Cricket returns to Guyana.
We could not be more excited.
And that's why we're recording this episode from the Guyana National Stadium in Providence.
That's not us editing the tape, that's the video as is going straight from oil to cricket without missing a beat. This is one of the ways Exon is building social license by associating cricket, Guyana's beloved national sport with Exon. These two young women, one of African descent the other of Indian descent, who appeal to as much of the Guyanese public as possible, all are filming from the national
cricket field and highlighting Exxon's contributions to Guyanese society. I asked Glen Law, the publisher of Kitter News we heard from up top, what he thinks of the cricket sponsorship.
I am so afraid, deep with in my soul, with what they're doing there. That is not only misleading, but it's very dangerous. I have said that on team times and I will repeat it tomorrow night on the radio. You see when they sponsor this cricket before I think two years ago, their sponsor cricket, and when you walk in the streets, you would hear every guy and saying doubt God for Eggson. It wasn't for Eggxon, we would have never been able to see cricket live on television.
You see how dangerous that it.
Oil companies, like all big industrial companies, work really hard to convince the public that they're doing more good than harm. They spend a lot of time and money on it. Social license. The public's willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt or support policies that the oil companies want is important to their business model. So when they do things like sponsoring sports teams and music festivals and schools,
they're not just playing the good guy. They're not just doing it for pr They're also making entire communities dependent on their apparent generosity. Over time, it makes people less likely to criticize them. Because they feel totally beholden to them. Remember how the Exon promotional video promised to answer all of our questions about the contract well before getting into
any of the actual details that they've promised. First they remind us that Exon is supporting cricket in a big way, and then they raise an eyebrow at what anyone else might be saying about this contract.
Well, recognizing that there is a lot of incorrect information out there, we hope to provide clarity through our conversations with president of ix On Mobile Guyana, Alistair Routledge and our treasurer at Katrina Masses in this episode of Access Exon Mobile.
And finally we get to the poultering. Here's Alistair Routledge, who heads up Exon's operations in Guyana.
So fundamentally, this is a sharing production sharing agreement.
This is the guy in charge of Exon in Guyana, Alistair Routledge.
But in that sharing agreement, the contractors, which is Exomobile, Hes and Snook, take all of the risk up front. So if we never made an economic development, we would swallow all of the costs that went into that investment. We would never get paid back. So there's never any risk for the state.
What Routledge is seeing is that Exon and its partners are investing money into the discovery and puduction of oil, and that's expensive. These are things like surveying the ocean floor to figure out where oil is and then drilling exploratory wells to see what kind of oil they can get there. And in Guyana they can get what's called light sweet crude, the best kind of oil. It's easier to turn into gasoline and it commands a higher price
on the world market. So in Guyana they not only found oil, they found a lot of the most profitable kind. But then there are more expenses before that oil can be sold. Wales need to be built, staff hired, the oil needs to be refined and shipped. All of it costs billions and billions of dollars. Here's ex On Guyana's Vice president and business service manager, Philip Reyatima, explaining it all at a press conference.
This is the first year since our inception in nineteen ninety nine that we've generated profit in Guyana, underscoring the complexity of our business and the years of investment required before payoff overall expenses. We're up from twenty twenty in line with increase in production.
In other words, deep water offshore drilling projects take a lot of time and a lot of money before they start to pay off, and before anyone can start divvying up profits. The oil companies need to pay themselves back for all those years of investment. It's only fair. But
there are a couple of things to keep in mind here. First. Well, yes, Exxon has technically been in Guyana since nineteen ninety nine, it only started actively looking for oil in two thousand and eight, and Exon spokespeople leave out some other key details that make things a whole lot more blurry. Here's what you need to know first, before there's any profit
to split. Exeon and its partners takes seventy five percent of all revenue off the top to pay themselves back for exploration and development costs, all those things that Routledge was talking about. So if you think about one hundred dollars barrel of oil, that's seventy five dollars to the oil company's straightaway. It's what the oil companies referred to
as cost oil. The remaining twenty five dollars or profit oil gets split between Guyana and the oil companies with an extra two percent royalty coming to Guyana for a grand total of fourteen dollars and fifty cents a barrel.
It may be ultimately over a long period of time of fifty to fifty split. Right now, it is not a fifty to fifty split right now, it's six to one.
This is Tomsonzilo from the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. He's looked at Guyana's oil contract closer than almost anybody.
Right now, you're looking at a revenue take of somewhere between six dollars to the oil and gas companies to every one dollar to the government of Guyana.
And just to put that royalty in perspective, that two percent that gets talked about as this like big extra tip for Guyana. The average range for royalties in situations like this is eight to twenty five percent, So two percent is quite a bit below the low end of that spectrum. It's not great. Plus, Guana's on the hook
for a lot of other costs. It pays Exon's Guyanese income tax, for example, and it's had to get foreign loans to cover the cost of various infrastructure projects that need to be built to support the fossil fuel industry, like the export terminal in Georgetown that Exon needs to
ship things in and out of. Second, you could look at the current split and say, okay, well, sure, but expenses are expenses, and once they're paid off, it will be fifty to fifty And again that's technically true, but as you heard from Ryet a moment ago, those expenses just keep growing. Here's where it starts to get really tricky. It's pretty normal for an oil company to recoup at least some of its development costs once a well starts
generating revenue. What's not common is for them to build against what's called future oil, the oil that future well sites are projected to produce.
All of Exxon's development costs are folded in as a part of the balance that's owed. They've developed a couple of existing wells where they're actually drawing oil, and that oil is producing revenue, and so they're getting money for that. But they now have also some twenty plus other fields that they have discovered that are not producing oil without the development costs get folded into the balance anyway. In other words, they're paying for future oil now.
So Exon has two wells that are producing actual barrels of oil for sale. That's where all the profit is coming from right now. But on top of covering the expenses associated with those wells, they're recouping the expenses associated with all of their ongoing exploration and development in Guyana. See Excellon didn't stop exploring once they found that initial bit of oil. They've continued to survey and drill to look for more oil, and they're continuing to build new
wells and production rigs too. All of that costs money, and normally those costs would be recouped once those new discoveries start producing sellable barrels of oil. But instead of waiting for that, Excellent and its partners are paying themselves back now with the profits from those first two wells. In other words, Guyana is paying today for well sites that may never turn a profit, and that's not generally how these projects work. Here's how investigative journalist Antonia Yuha Let's put it.
It is unprecedented that Exxon is recouping all of its costs, all of its development costs, that the Guyanese people are subsidizing all of the development costs for Exon.
Like Senzilo, Juhas, has read a lot of oil contracts. She's been digging into Guyana situation since twenty nineteen and has written about it for The Guardian and Wired, and she's written books on the way the oil industry operates in the Gulf of Mexico and also any rock in Guyana.
You've got these two big issues. Seventy five percent of revenue comes off the top of every barrel to cover expenses, and Exon is front loading those expenses, which means Guyana is paying today for wells that may or may not pay off tomorrow. So far, those expenses are estimated at up to twenty nine billion dollars, which could take up to ten years to pay off. But to really understand the problem with this setup, you kind of have to understand the global oil market a bit too. It is,
in a word, volatile. The past year has been very, very good to the industry, thanks in large part to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Oil has fluctuated between eighty and one hundred and thirty nine dollars a barrel, and oil companies have been pocketing record profits. But for years before that, oil prices were pretty regularly hitting record lows. Fifty dollars a barrel seemed kind of like the new normal. And then remember at the height of the COVID nineteen pandemic
in twenty twenty, oil prices actually went negative. In other words, to sell a barrel of oil, you would have to pay the person you are selling that barrel to money. That's because demand plummeted, but companies kept right on producing the same amount and there was nowhere to put it. There was no storage left. At one point, anyone selling a barrel of oil was having to pay the buyer thirty dollars.
Oil prices have turned negative. The most extraordinary development that took place today when the US main blend West Texas Intermediate fell more than three hundred and six percent.
Shutting down wells can be expensive and complicated, and then there's the risk that you won't be able to get them back up and running again when prices rise. So some oil companies just keep pumping even if they're losing money. Not exactly a rock solid investment. In fact, most forecasters predict prices will go down as the decade progresses, in part due to slowing demand as people and countries transition
away from fossil fuels. So by the time those wells Guana is paying for today actually start to turn a profit, and by the time those profits are truly being split fit fifty, things are likely to look very different than they do today. That's why Glenn Mall is taking to TikTok every chance he gets to beat the drum for renegotiating the contract.
Now tell me again.
How or not that is a fifty to fifty profit sharing business. Huh when one side is huffing out trick quarter barrel up front, I'm calling it cost oil. Guyana cannot say definitively to this country what percentage of revenue the Guyanese people are receiving from our oil deal.
The contract was not made freely, knowingly and fairly by compretent people. And our hands are not handcuffed. We are not chained to a concrete posts. So what is stopping us from changing it?
Calls to renegotiate the contract have gotten enough support that Exon is starting to spend some of its marketing budget to counteract the idea that Guyana has a bad deal. It made that promotional video I mentioned earlier, for example, and it's been putting up massive billboards all over Guyana about the fifty to fifty split, But not everyone agrees with law about the need to renegotiate. Some people say he's just mad that he's not getting rich off the oil.
Others buy Exon's argument that it's only fair for the company to recoup its costs in this way. But another small but growing group of people thinks haggling over the details of the contract is a fool's errand that Guyana needs to look past the contract, past the promises of oil riches, and really grapple with the harm that this project could do in Guyana, and beyond the fact that there are all these expenses to pay up front and that it could be a long time before a true
fifty to fifty split kicks in. Creates a huge incentive for Guyana to fast track oil production. The more barrels they can produce, and the faster they can produce them, the faster they can pay off those expenses and get to that oil wealth that the public has been promised, and fast treking appears to be exactly what they're doing. Routledge himself regularly comments on how everything in Guyana is happening ahead of schedule at an unprecedented pace.
Really just six years, less than six years that we've been exploring offshore Guyana to achieve that amound is quite outstanding.
Well excellent.
Just repeats every chance it gets that everything about this production has been ahead of schedule and way faster than its other operations. It says this as a point of pride.
That's investigative journalist Antonia Juhas.
Again, this is a point of concern that why is it so much faster than everywhere else. Exon has been producing oil over one hundred and fifty years. Why is it suddenly you receive this ability to move so much faster in Guyana than it does everywhere else in the world. And the answer is really simple. There's no oversight, there's no one telling them to slow down, be careful, follow
the rules. It's one of the reasons why it's so cheap for Exon to produce there, and it's why Exon is pushing so much of its production there.
At the end of twenty twenty two, Exon announced that its first two wells in Guyana we're producing above design capacity, so pumping out more barrels than they were designed to produce. If it stays on its current production schedule, Guyana will be neck and neck with Exon's longtime stronghold, the Permium Basin in Texas within five years.
That is a shocking development for a country that didn't have any oil production three years ago.
It's actually another example of paltering too. Exon boasts to its shareholders and the public about the remarkable speed with which it is developing an oil industry in Guyana, but in reality, that speed is a major red flag because while it's true that rapidly increasing production can increase profits in the short term, there's another thing that's even more common when oil companies fast track things.
The gusher unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew crude oil. There are no reliable estimates of how much oil is pouring into the gulf, but it comes to many millions of gallons. Since the catastrophic blew out in.
The US golf, you did have one hundred and fifty years of experience, you do have some of the best regulations in the world, and though limited, you do still
have some of the best oversight capacity in the world. Again, though limited and still the worst offshore drilling oil disaster in history took place in the US Gulf of Mexico under these circumstances, and there is tremendous concern both by experts and by everybody I talked to in Guyana about what would happen if there was a disaster in the deep waters offshore Guyana.
That's our story next time. Late Sweet Crude is a Drilled and Damage's co production. Both shows are Critical Frequency originals. Our editor and senior producer is Sarah Ventry. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Martin Saltz Austwick, Our fact checker is Anna Prugel Mazzini, and our first amendment attorney is James Wheaton. The show is reported and written by me Amy Westerveldt, additional reporting by Keana Wilberg in Guyana and
Antonio Juhas in DC. We had additional assistance in Guyana from Jamal Thomas Salvadorda, Carrie's Wilderness Explorers, and the staff at Kaiman House. Special thanks to Michael McCrystal for his help as well. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Foreknown. The cover of The Godfather Love theme is by Young Ones of Guyana and licensed from bb Music. Sing a Simple Song was originally written by Sly and
the Family Stone. It's performed in this episode by the Young Ones of Guyana, licensed by b a ME Music. Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. Marketing is handled by the Great Maggie Taylor PR and media outreach by the wonderful folks at Tink Media Lauren Passel, Ariel Nissenblatt and Devin Andrade. The show is supported in part by generous grants from the Doc Society File Foundation, the William Collins Kohler Foundation, and you