Gas injection equipment finally fixed – says Exxon

ExxonMobil had been flaring gas at the Liza Destiny vessel all year, despite the fact that the gas is supposed to be re-injected into the reservoir. This photo, which was taken just a few days ago, shows Exxon flaring at day.

As production at the Liza Destiny Floating Production and Offloading (FPSO) vessel reaches full capacity of 120,000 barrels of oil per day, ExxonMobil claimed that it has “successfully commissioned the gas injection system”, which was previously reported as being defective, thereby causing Exxon to flare billions of cubic feet of toxic natural gas. These and other details were shared by President of ExxonMobil Guyana, Alistair Routledge, yesterday.

“Earlier this month,” Routledge said, “we were able to reduce the flaring to its background levels, just to pilot flare levels and now we’re operating at capacity.”
Research indicates that combustion requires three ingredients: fuel, an oxidizing agent (typically oxygen in air), and heat (or ignition source). Flares typically operate with that said pilot flames to provide the ignition source, and they use ambient air as the oxidizing agent.

This recent development follows an entire year over which the oil major had failed to mitigate the flaring at Liza-1, its very first field development in Guyana. Exxon was only meant to briefly flare gas at project start-up in late December last year, to test and fully commission the gas compression and injection systems at the site.
However, the company would end up flaring gas way longer than expected due to what it said to be a defective main and injection gas compressor.

According to an Environment Protection Agency (EPA) brief, ExxonMobil had said that the third stage-flash gas compressor and suction silencer had been sent for repair in Germany and were returned to the Liza Destiny FPSO in late October.
The EPA had said that same was being reinstalled and was expected to restart functioning in mid-November. Exxon, according to the November update, had expected the equipment to take one to two weeks of testing to confirm that the repairs and modifications worked.

Notably, at the end of October, the company had flared more than 16M cubic feet of natural gas, thereby making Guyana one of the top five countries in the world for volume flared per year, per capita. In September, Guyana had trailed Libya, Gabon, Oman, Qatar and Iraq, in total gas flared per capita, judging from statistics from the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report (July, 2020). However, the increased flaring in October caused Guyana to surpass Iraq.

The company claimed it had to flare, since its gas compression equipment was defective and needed to undergo repairs overseas. The repairs reportedly proved difficult to undergo with haste, given limitations the COVID-19 pandemic safety guidelines have placed on companies. Exxon is yet to complete the repairs to all of its defective equipment.
Yesterday, Kaieteur News reached out to ExxonMobil’s Public and Government Affairs Advisor, Janelle Persaud, in seeking answers on whether the oil company’s gas compressor had been fully repaired, and on what date; what specifically was repaired on their defective equipment and at what cost, and on what date was the flaring had finally stopped.

Persaud failed on sharing specifics on the details requested by Kaieteur News. Instead, she sent a link to a video statement by Routledge, which mentioned no details to the company’s flaring.
Notably, EPA Head Sharifah Razack has promised to share with Kaieteur News details on Exxon’s updated details on flaring, today.