Exxon released a statement Thursday saying that they, along with Hess, have discovered an oil deposit off the coast of Guyana that potentially holds 800 million to 1.4 billion barrels of oil.
“We are excited by the results of a production test of the Liza-2 well, which confirms the presence of high-quality oil,” the Exxon statement read. Hess also released the statement on their website noting the findings.
This is the second time in two years Exxon has made a major oil discovery off the coast of Guayana. In 2015, Exxon announced their Liza-1 drill had found a large deposit, later reported by Bloomberg to be holding 700 million barrels.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) released a 2012 report that said Guyana has massive potential for oil discoveries, even undercutting the potential.
“In addition, several provinces are estimated to have significant undiscovered conventional oil potential, including the Guyana−Suriname Basin Province (mean of 1.3 billion barrels of oil),” the report claimed.
If Exxon and Hess indeed just found 1.4 billion barrels of oil, coupled with the 700 million Exxon found in 2015, the USGS’s 2012 estimate of 1.3 billion barrels may be incredibly low. The recent finds bolster an industry that has struggled in recent years to make major oil discoveries like the ones in Guyana.
“It is getting harder and harder to make large oil finds,” Leta Smith, a director at the consulting firm IHS told Fuel Fix Thursday. “One of the things that has been troublesome over the past several years is each year we see fewer discovered volumes”
Exxon has 8.1 million acres off the Guyana coast available for oil exploration, “To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of 1,400 Gulf of Mexico blocks,” Exxon CEO Russ Tillerson told Forbes Thursday.
In 2007, off the coast of Ghana, Africa, three billion barrels of oil were found and geologists think the western Atlantic is a mirror image of what is being found on the African side, as reported by Forbes.
The discovery comes as welcome news for Exxon since they were recently downgraded from the Standard and Poor’s top credit rating of AAA for the first time since The Great Depression, according to an article from April published by The Dallas Morning News.
There is cause for concern for Guyana though, as Venezuela has tried disputing their borders since the 2015 oil discovery, as reported by The Independent in 2015.
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