This series, originally carried in the Stabroek News, will continue on this platform while maintaining the numerical sequence of the columns
Road to First Oil
Every man, woman and child must become Oil-minded
The report of a quiet settlement – some US$82 million paid following arbitration in the Gas-to-Energy Project – ought to give the country pause. Not because disputes arise in projects of this scale – they do – but because of how early, how quietly, and how expensively this one has done so. It is a thought that comes uncomfortably to mind, for what we are witnessing is not merely a problem of execution but a problem of design.
Projects of this magnitude do not descend into arbitration at this stage unless something fundamental has already gone wrong – not only in construction, but in conception, procurement and planning. The Wales development now presents a pattern rather than an isolated difficulty. The soil problems – predictable, avoidable, and elementary – have required extensive stabilisation work at significant additional cost. That is not contingency; it is a failure of due diligence. The arbitration, settled at approximately US$82 million after an even larger initial claim, is not misfortune but a failure of contract structuring and risk allocation. And surrounding all of this is a troubling silence in which the country was not told, the cost was not disclosed, and the implications have not been explained.
Layered onto this is the matter of time – promised, revised, and repeatedly missed. The project was first presented with timelines that spoke to completion within a compressed horizon, at one stage as early as 2024. That date passed. It was then shifted to 2025. That too slipped. We were then told to look to 2026, and now even that horizon appears uncertain, with full completion drifting into 2027. Each revision has been presented as an adjustment; taken together, they tell a different story. Deadlines are not merely dates on a calendar – they are statements of planning, competence and control. When they are missed once, questions arise. When they are missed repeatedly, conclusions begin to form.
The difficulty, however, runs deeper than delay. This project is inseparably tied to the petroleum operations offshore under the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement. The gas originates there, its economics are shaped there, and its accounting must ultimately return there. Yet the project is treated as though it exists outside that framework – outside its transparency, its discipline, and its scrutiny. If any part of this expenditure is treated as recoverable cost, then the country is paying in ways not immediately visible: not only through direct budgetary outlays, but through reduced oil revenues. It is paying in cash, and in silence.
Even on the most conservative view, the visible costs alone are troubling. A project once presented in the hundreds of millions now sits comfortably in the billions, and each delay adds not only time but cost, while each dispute adds not only cost but uncertainty. Each missed deadline extends the period during which households and businesses continue to pay existing tariffs, pushing further away the central promise upon which the project was sold: cheaper electricity. In the meantime, there is a compounding burden in which capital is committed but not productive, inefficiencies accumulate, and assumptions are overtaken by reality. The project does not wait for reality; reality moves on without the project.
There are also costs that do not appear in any estimate, but which are nonetheless real. Land has been compulsorily acquired, and citizens have been required to surrender property for what is said to be a national purpose. Yet questions remain as to whether compensation reflects true value. Where fairness is uncertain, legitimacy is weakened, and where legitimacy is weakened, dissatisfaction and suspicion inevitably follow.
And still, the central question remains unanswered: who is responsible? There is no clear single point of accountability, no consolidated reporting, and no regular, transparent accounting of cost, progress, and risk. Responsibility appears diffused, accountability remains elusive, and transparency is, at best, selective. In such an environment, even success becomes difficult to measure and failure difficult to assign.
We have seen this movie before, not as a trailer – or as a shorts as it was called in my days – but as a full saga. The Skeldon Sugar Modernisation Project followed a similar path of early promise, escalating cost, shifting timelines, prolonged silence, and then disaster. The difference now is one of scale. Then, the sums seemed large; now, they seem modest. Yet the underlying lesson appears unchanged, and the consequences potentially far greater.
What is perhaps most concerning is that even though this project remains incomplete – its cost uncertain and its performance untested – there is already movement toward expansion. Another gas-to-energy project, additional capacity, and replication without validation are being contemplated. This is not sequencing but escalation, and it risks compounding uncertainty rather than resolving it.
We are told that this is a “world-class” project. It may yet become one. But as matters now stand, it is something else: not a white elephant, for it will be used, but a costly lesson in weak planning, poor sequencing, and avoidable error. What began as a promise of progress has become a matter of concern – about cost, about competence, and about governance. And now, with the disclosure of the arbitration settlement and the accumulation of missed deadlines, one further conclusion presses itself forward: this is no longer merely a project under strain; it is a project riddled with uncertainties, missed deadlines, mismanagement, ballooning cost and bleeding billions.