Severe poverty in Suriname erupted last week with unprecedented looting and the storming of parliament. The solution seems near, in the form of oil and gas. Why aren’t they winning yet?
Raphaël Milleman welds together two pieces of a metal sphere in a factory just outside Paramaribo. If he looked up, he would see the saturated green of the jungle through the meters-high open doors. But the 20-year-old student of the Surinamese machine building company Pansa continues to stare into the blue flame of the welding machine until the two parts have melted together. Because if Milleman successfully completes this piece of work, he will have his certificate as a basic welder in his pocket.
A little later, Milleman, while modeling his afro that has been crushed by the welding helmet, tells us that until recently he was a meal delivery driver. He was among the 39 percent of Surinamese young adults who left school without a diploma and without a plan. He was convinced by his father, who also works for Pansa, to take an apprenticeship here. ‘Now I want to get all the certificates here, even the most difficult ones, for underwater welding. Because you earn more on a drilling platform.’ And then? ‘Start for myself and earn a lot of money in the oil industry.’
Oil lies at the feet of Suriname, a few kilometers under the Atlantic Ocean. Lots of oil. No one knows exactly how much, but maybe 6 billion barrels. Enough for a place in the global top 25 countries with an oil supply. Enough, perhaps, to ease the political tensions caused by economic malaise and poverty, which last week led to unprecedented looting and a storming of parliament.
“Boys and girls like Raphaël Milleman are badly needed in this country,” says Lucien Bourne, manager at Pansa. ‘Because when the oil arrives soon, we want as few workers as possible from abroad, our own people have to earn from it.’ He talks about the low morale among young people due to the poor economic conditions, about the poor education. That is why Pansa actively looks for students and lures them with the prospect of a well-paid job in the oil industry.
“Belief in one’s own abilities is the common thread,” says Bourne, who proudly emphasizes that Pansa was founded by Maroons, the inland population descended from escaped slaves who rank at the bottom of socio-economic statistics. In the forty-year company history, Pansa has produced and repaired everything that the Surinamese industry can use. ‘And now we are ready for oil and gas.’
Crushing national debt
Anyone who hears Lucien Bourne talk, whether or not above the drone of machines, becomes irrevocably cheerful. With his black mustache and polo shirt in his jeans, the fifty-year-old seems to have walked out of a vintage Mario game. His optimism makes one forget that Suriname is a small country with a crushing national debt, a politically divided population, a poorly functioning government, corruption and brain drain.
But since the first major oil discovery off the Surinamese coast in 2020, there has been a side door in that gloomy reality with a sign saying ‘possible redemption’. Suriname dreams of a Norway scenario, of many billions of oil in a special fund, the proceeds of which will mean the end of dependence on international creditors and the International Monetary Fund.
Only: the door to the oil is still locked. The key is a signature of Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of French oil giant TotalEnergies. Only when he final investment decision (FID), Total, together with the smaller American APA Corporation, will invest the necessary billions in advanced floating oil production platforms to extract and process the oil on the high seas.
But Total has already postponed the FID five times since 2020, without giving any clear reasons. The last time was early February. Surinamese, tried and tested by their experience with corrupt leaders such as ex-president Desi Bouterse, are used to taking high expectations with a grain of salt. And they know that for countries with a lot of oil, in addition to a Norway scenario, there is also a Venezuela scenario, in which the population sees nothing of the oil billions.
But the deeper the crisis, the more difficult it becomes for Surinamese not to see oil as the solution to everything. And so everyone from the president to the fruit seller in the market keeps talking about the arrival of the final investment decision, ‘the FID’, as if it were the next bus.
Neighboring Guyana is luckier
To see how oil can make a country flourish, the Surinamese only have to look at their neighbors in Guyana. Oil was found in the Guyanese part of the sea around the same time, and the country was lucky to get a quick deal with the Texan oil company Exxon. Partly because at the time, even poorer Guyana set less high standards than Suriname. Despite this, the government can annually deposit a few billion in royalties and profits into the fund that the country has set up on the Norwegian model.
And that stings a bit. Because of the three small countries in the bend of the South American continent, Suriname has always been the oil country. Suriname has been pumping up oil itself since the 1980s. Not in the sea but on land. Small scale, but enough to be self sufficient. The stable Staatsolie is currently even the backbone of the moribund Surinamese economy.
But the state oil company is too small to handle the ocean operation alone, says CEO Annand Jagesar de Volkskrant on the phone from Norway where he is on a course to learn about oil funds. Jagesar is proud of the negotiation result he has achieved with Total and APA: if they start drilling, Staatsolie will be able to purchase 20 percent of the production, as a result of which Suriname will earn much more per barrel of oil than Guyana. But then Total must first make the investment decision.
Not everyone is waiting for the signature from France. Someone will bring that oil up, think Helmut Haukes and Oliver Smith. ‘If necessary, the Chinese,’ mutters Haukes as he steers his SUV onto the surrealistically high and narrow Jules Wijdenbosch Bridge over the Suriname River, out of town.
Haukes is a boeroe, a white Surinamese, and boss of a logistics company. Smith is a Briton who runs an engineering firm in Paramaribo. Together they are building a port terminal especially for oil ships at the mouth of the Suriname River, on the land of the former Susanna’s Daal coffee plantation.
stinkbird
The road to it is now an unpaved cart track along green creeks. ‘Look! Stinkbirds!’ Haukes enthusiastically points to a row of frayed-looking animals on an electric wire. (On inquiry it turns out that stinkbirds are officially called hoatzins and owe their nickname to the fact that they smell strongly of cow dung.) From the backseat, Smith adds: the construction workers saw a 6-meter anaconda slither past here last week .
At the end of the track is an almost endless leveled sand plain full of cranes and pile drivers. If everything goes according to plan, ships will be able to moor here within a year and a half. Smith takes the catalog from the backseat and shows how they want to develop this plain into a mature haven with several access roads and space for offices and hotels.
Still, the question is whether it will ever come to that. Not only because of the investment decision, but also because there are also two other companies that are building oil ports. One even closer to the city and one in Nieuw Nickerie, near the border with Guyana. And only one port is needed. Smith says he is certain that they have the best location, with deep water and little risk of silting up. ‘So after the FID,’ he says with a cowboy grin, ‘the competition starts. And I love competition.’
Why isn’t Total signing? Nobody knows exactly, says Lucia van Geuns, energy expert at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies (HCSS), who occasionally flies to Paramaribo to teach students of the new Master’s program in Petroleum Geoscience and Engineering at the Anton de Come University. In any case, it seems that the oil in Surinamese waters is less easy to extract than from the neighbors, she says. This is mainly because there is more gas in the oil, too much to pump back into the ground, as is happening in Guyana. And simply flaring, burning, is no longer allowed.
Total probably wants Suriname to come up with and pay for the solution for the gas itself. In principle, there are plenty of opportunities to sell the gas in the region. But building the necessary infrastructure is a large and complex project for a small country with no experience in gas extraction, little money and a chronic lack of competent people in government and business.
Ultimately, Total will sign, thinks Van Geuns. But only when the gas issue has been resolved and the company has mapped out very precisely how much oil there is and how long it wants to continue extracting it. ‘Because a company like Total is of course in the middle of the European reality of the end of the fossil era, climate policy and critical shareholders.’
special ecosystem
In the Surinamese reality, where people wonder every day how they can get enough money for three meals and petrol for their car, climatic objections are met with incomprehension.
So the voices questioning oil extraction are soft voices. Such as that of environmental activist and researcher Monique Pool, who every Sunday morning observes the dolphin population in the wide estuary of the Suriname River from a small boat with a group of volunteers. The arriving and departing oil ships will soon disrupt the special ecosystem in this delta, she says.
But because of the dire economic situation, even Pool is in favor of exploiting the oil fields off the coast. She believes that emerging economies should be allowed to extract fossil fuels for longer than the rich, industrialized countries that got rich with them in the last century. ‘Oil and gas are a necessary evil here in Suriname for the time being.’
