雪佛龙拒绝继续资助收购赫斯后继承的圭亚那深水港前期研究

Chevron Corp. declined to continue supporting a proposed deep water port in Guyana after last year’s acquisition of Hess Corp., which had funded preliminary studies for the project.

Guyana’s government is promoting the $1 billion to $2 billion port project to offer logistics for northern Brazil and to anchor a proposed industrial hub that would feature data centers, fertilizer plants and possibly a refinery tied to the country’s growing oil and gas production.

After Bechtel Group Inc. completed preliminary front-end engineering and design in 2023 with support from Hess, Chevron declined to go ahead with further studies, the engineering company’s Guyana manager Harry Pastuszek said Tuesday at an industry conference in the Guyanese capital.

Hess “funded the pre-front-end engineering and design we did on the port with a notional agreement that they would continue to fund in partnership with the government as we pushed forward,” Pastuszek said. After the July 2025 acquisition, “Chevron sort of sat down and said, ‘you’re doing what? Why would we? No, not going to do.’”

Chevron declined to comment.

The Hess acquisition gave Chevron a stake in competitor ExxonMobil Holdings Corp.’s oil and gas operations off Guyana.

Pastuszek said Bechtel is currently conducting a feasibility study on behalf of the government to understand the potential for opening northern Brazil through an Atlantic port in Guyana. The study will update decade-old work by the Inter-American Development Bank, he said at the trade and investment conference underway this week in Georgetown.

The US Export-Import Bank has presented a letter of interest to Guyana’s government to finance a three-phase engineering design study “hopefully very quickly after the feasibility study is done,” Bruce Ellsworth, senior commercial officer at the US embassy in Guyana, told conference delegates.

Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali recently said Qatar has expressed interest in financing construction of the deepwater port.

Bankability

The feasibility study is being conducted by CrossBoundary Group, an investment adviser.

Moving goods from Manaus or northern Brazil through a road being constructed from the Guyana-Brazil border to the new port “could be a shorter, more reliable route for manufactured goods” compared to ports in southeastern Brazil, CrossBoundary’s deputy head of Latin America and the Caribbean, Jamie McInerney, said on the panel.

McInerney says he is gathering data from various sources to ascertain how much revenue the port could generate, if it could attract investment and potential sources of capital.

“We will look to put some hard numbers on the demand and potential throughput for such a facility and then, of course, also look at what sort of revenue and cash flow that type of facility could possibly generate,” McInerney said, adding that it has yet to be determined whether “what is a very expensive piece of infrastructure is bankable.”

Guyanese shipping executive Chandradat Chintamani said a deep water port in Berbice, eastern Guyana, would require a 100-kilometer (62-mile) dedicated “superhighway” to move cargo to Georgetown.

The site would facilitate logistics for ExxonMobil’s offshore oil and gas operations. The major’s Longtail project, which is still awaiting government approval, would produce 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas and 290,000 barrels of condensate daily. The company is currently producing around 900,000 barrels of oil a day off Guyana.

Another local shipping executive, David Fernandes, said the port should have a natural draft of 10 to 12 meters in contrast to Port Georgetown’s 9 meters in order to accommodate Panamax vessels to handle cargo of up to 30,000 tons.

The port study will show “what we can do in Guyana,” but also that “we can become a transshipment point for Brazil, northern Brazil specifically,” he said.