House of Labour: Listening to Leslie Miller, the Minister responsible for Consumers Affairs in the current Progressive Liberal Party (PLP). Consumers in The Bahamas may get the impression that the country is on the verge of finding considerable oil deposits.
Speaking at the 47th PLP convention last Thursday night, Minister Miller said the government sincerely hopes that the search for oil in The Bahamas By Kerr McGee Corporation off the Great Bahamian Bank is successful and that such a discovery would provide the country with a new sector for economic growth and development.
According to press reports, “The minister said the company is prepared to spend more than $25 million to search for oil in the waters off the Great Bahamas Banks. The government, he mdd has already received $900,000 in licensing fees. He further added that the Kerr-McGee Corporation has stated that in one particular area, oil is already seeping to the surface.”
Furthermore, government will receive more than $4million during the exploration stage and that it has been agreed that if oil is discovered, The Bahamas will receive 18 percent of any revenue earned as a result.
In times of economic crisis, our politicians are obliged to provide hope of the things to come. However, this is not the first time politicians have pulled this rabbit out of the hat. Further press reports also disclose “that Kerr-McGee corporation is based in Oklahoma City and has reserves of more than 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent at year end 2001.
The company explores for oil and gas in selected basin around the world and has producing fields in the Gulf of Mexico, the United Kingdom, the North Sea and the South China Sea and onshore in the United States, Ecuador, Indonesia and Kazakhstan.
Consumers, however, before they get their hopes up for an oil bonanza should remember that Alfred Maycock, the former economics and trade minister in 1984 at the PLP Convention that year attempted to perpetuate the hoax that the presence of large oil deposits in The Bahamas is a distinct possibility and that its extraction was imminent.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs prominently announced that yet another oil company, Pectin Petroleum company of Houston Texas, received permission from the government to ‘conduct seismic and geological surveys in The Bahamas in search of oil deposits.”
Consumer’s Corner wish to point out that the general consensus of scientific opinion is, that the possibility of discovering oil and gas deposits in The Bahamas is extremely remote, and in the unlikely event some is found, the cost of extracting it commercially would be prohibitive. Supporting this opinion, research reveals the following facts on the efforts to discover oil in the Bahamas so far.
A bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) in 1974 stated that four deep wells were drilled in The Bahamas in the most promising areas and all came up dry. The first well, Candors 1, was drilled in 1946-47 to a total depth of 14,585 feet. The other wells were Cay Sal IV-1, drilled by Standard Oil company of California in 1958-59 to a depth of 18,906 feet, the Long Island-1, drilled by Mobil, Standard of California, and Gulf in 1970 to a depth of 17,557 feet; and Great Isaacs – 1, drilled by Standard oil of California in 1970-71 to a depth of 17,847 feet. (The AAPG Bulletin, June, 1974).
Not much oil exploration has been done in The Bahamas since the Great Isaacs I well of 1970 – 71. And it was because of this that when our government announced in 1981 that The Bahamas was again ‘opening its offshore area to oil and gas exploration,’ the Oil and Gas Journal reported: “The new work will be the first significant exploration since The Bahamas government rescinded exploration licenses in the early 1970s.”
In assessing The Bahamas potential for commercial petroleum deposits, the following must be kept in mind by consumers. First, a combination of factors or favorable conditions are necessary for the presence of oil, if any one is absent there will be no oil. These factors are first, the existence – sometime in the past – of organic matter which over millions of years could have been converted to oil or gas.
Secondly, the presence of porous rock for the petroleum to be stored in. Finally, reservoir seals or non porous rock to form traps to hold the petroleum.
The Bahamas, in areas has the rocks structure and formation which indicate to the oil and gas community that there might be the potential for oil and gas discoveries. This is especially true in the northwest Bahamas Platform Region.
The existence of such structures was confirmed in 1981 by Petroleum Services Ltd. of the Bahamas and Geophysical Services Inc. of Dallas. However, two important factors militate against the possibility of the presence of gas and oil.
First, there are no signs that organic matter in quantities large enough to form petroleum was ever present in the area. Second, there has been a serious faulting (cracking) and fracturing process going on in The Bahamas over a long period thus forming cracks. These cracks would break the seal reservoirs thereby releasing the petroleum and gas deposits even if they were there in the first place.
According to the AAPG Bulletin, there has been active faulting throughout The Bahamas especially in the Great Amoco Fracture Zone, the cracks in the reservoir seals which result from faulting are significant, according to the AAPG Bulletin, because: “Subsurface caverns, seawater invasion and paucity of seals perhaps are responsible for the lack of hydrocarbons beneath the banks. In other words, even if there were petroleum or gas deposits in the Banks and Continental shelf of The Bahamas, because of cracks or faulting, there is every likelihood that they have been washed out by the Atlantic Ocean over millions of years.
Discussing this topic with a local Geology source, who did research in this area, Consumers Corner were told: “I do not believe that The Bahamas Platform Region will provide economically significant petroleum reserves. The Bahamas Platform would have been largely washed of any hydrocarbon reserves by the waters of the Atlantic, if indeed there were any hydrocarbons present at the start. The fact that the region may never have possessed hydrocarbons and that the region has been open to the Atlantic for a significant part of its history makes it doubly unlikely that it now possesses any economically significant oil reserves.”
This local source also drew our attention to the failure of the oil companies to strike oil in the Georges Bank off the coast of New England. According to our source by exploration geologists, “this was considered to have the greatest potential oil reserves of any area along the eastern US seaboard. So, if they are coming up dry up there, we must further re-evaluate our thinking about the less attractive areas like The Bahamas.” There are a number of reasons besides the belief that they will strike oil, why the odd oil company will continue to conduct ‘seismic and geological surveys’ in The Bahamas not the least of being for tax write off purposes, said our source. But consumers mustn’t be deceived in believing that there is any great chance of discovering oil in The Bahamas
We have researched this topic because the oil hoax is an old reliable ‘scam’ in all of our governments bags of propaganda tricks which mask their lack of creativity at times of crises.
In the past, the flags of convenience and Free Trade zones gimmicks have joined the oil hoax as substitutes for economic planning and the preparation of our young consumers for honest and productive work in building the Bahamian nation.
Charles Fawkes is President of the National Consumer Association and organizer for the Commonwealth Group of Unions, Inside Labour Columnist for the Bahama Journal, Editor of the Headline News, The ConsumerGuard and The Workers’ Vanguard. His email address is fawkesmore@maill. coralwave. com He can be contacted at his office in the House of Labour at 326-6620.
