From The Wall Street Journal
An oil exploration ship run by Exxon Mobil Corp. halted work and fled after being intercepted by Venezuela’s Navy, rekindling a border dispute between the two nations just as a separate political crisis threatened Guyana’s government.
Owned by Norway’s Petroleum Geo-Services and bearing a Bahamian flag, the seismic-survey vessel was stopped by a Venezuelan Navy ship Saturday morning in Guyanese waters, about 90 miles from a provisional border, Guyana said.
PGS and Exxon didn’t give further details of the encounter but said the research ship, which had been acquiring the 3-D seismic data needed for drilling, stopped work and left with its 70 crew members. The Venezuelans didn’t board the ship, said its operators.
Ten offshore oil discoveries since 2015 by an Exxon-led consortium, accounting for 5 billion barrels of crude, have turned Guyana, one of South America’s poorest nations, into one of the region’s hottest oil frontiers. But the finds have also resurfaced a simmering, century-old border controversy stemming from Venezuela’s claims of two-thirds of Guyana’s territory.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejects this illegal, aggressive and hostile act,” Guyana Foreign Minister Carl Greenidge said in a statement, calling Venezuela “the real threat to Guyana’s economic development.”
The fracas occurred as the government in Georgetown faces a potentially greater political battle on the domestic front. Guyana’s parliament late Friday approved a no-confidence vote in the administration of President David Granger, triggering early elections in March, just as the country prepares for the start of commercial oil pumping in 2020.
Mr. Granger, who has been out of the public eye since being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in November, took office in 2015 with a political coalition promising to tackle corruption and ending decades of tensions between the descendants of African slaves and East Indian laborers who make up Guyana’s two largest ethnic groups.
But the government has faced criticism for not renegotiating a deal that many Guyanese say is too generous to foreign oil partners and leaves little for the nation’s development. Mr. Granger’s aides have defended the deal as the best option for a country with virtually no experience in the oil industry.
Exxon, meanwhile, said it paused the seismic operations it was performing under a Guyanese government license. “Our main concern is for the safety of crew members and others in the area,” said a spokeswoman for the Irving, Texas, company.
Venezuela’s Navy approached the research vessel to inform the crew that they had no authorization work in the area and that their permit from the Guyanese government was invalid in waters claimed by Caracas, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. In the past, President Nicolás Maduro has slammed Exxon’s offshore oil operations in Guyana as a provocation.
The U.S. State Department said that it was monitoring reports of the interception of the Exxon-hired ship and called on Venezuela to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors. “Guyana has the sovereign right to explore and exploit resources in its territorial waters,” State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said in a Twitter post.
In recent weeks, the president has made repeated promises to strengthen Venezuela’s military defense as relations fray with the U.S. and Latin American countries that have largely condemned the Maduro administration’s slide into authoritarian rule.
Mr. Greenidge said he would inform the United Nations of a breach on his country’s national sovereignty.
The crude deposits could be a game changer for Guyana, a former British colony with less than 800,000 people and an economy dependent on agriculture, mining and lumber.
Guyana’s government, however, says resolving the border dispute is paramount to its economic aspirations.
A Paris arbitration tribunal in 1899 had set the internationally recognized border between both countries, but Venezuela 60 years later rejected the boundary saying it was cheated.
In 2013, Venezuela’s navy briefly detained a Malaysian-owned seafloor survey ship hired by Guyana and the U.S. oil company Anadarko along with its crew.
Efforts by a U.N. commission to settle the border issue fell apart earlier this year, leading it to send the case to the International Court of Justice.
