Ana Iacob Photography/Shutterstock Save for later Print Download Share Suriname is poised to join the world stage as a global energy supplier after French supermajor TotalEnergies and US independent APA green-lighted the country's first major oil and gas development last week. The $10.5 billion deepwater GranMorgu project puts the small South American nation on the map as a future producer and likely exporter of oil, and possibly LNG, joining some of its neighbors in the ranks of emerging players. While no one yet expects Suriname to compete with future regional powerhouses Brazil and Guyana, GranMorgu represents an important first step for a country where some of the world's biggest companies see great potential. "Suriname will never be the same," declared Annand Jagesar, CEO of state-run oil company Staatsolie. The country has produced oil since the 1980s, mostly heavy crude, onshore, that is consumed domestically with modest regional exports of clean products. Production totaled less than 16,000 barrels per day in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. GranMorgu will catapult Suriname into a whole new class, with initial production capacity pegged at 220,000 b/d due to come on line in 2028. The project aims to tap more than 750 million barrels of recoverable oil from the Sapakara and Krabdagu fields in offshore Block 58, discovered and appraised in 2023. That's not quite on par with Guyana's massive Stabroek Block, directly to the west, where operator Exxon Mobil is planning to produce some 1.3 million b/d by the end of the decade from a recoverable resource estimated at over 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent. But Exxon's rapid progress there has enabled Total to launch GranMorgu on an accelerated timeline with the early selection of a benchmark-setting hull design for the Suriname project's anchor floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, a standardized iteration of the FPSOs producing in Guyana.
