How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot

Could Guyana’s Exxon ruling scare big oil off risky exploration?

Guyana High Court: EPA and ExxonMobil Put Country At Grave Risk

Debunking the "Moral Case" for Fossil Fuels

[00:00:01] We've been focused on Guyana this season and for good reason. It's on track to become the world's largest oil producer per capita in the next decade. But it's also important to note that what's happening in Guyana is pretty illustrative of what's happening all over the world right now. There is a global oil rush and it's hitting the Caribbean region and Africa particularly hard. Today, I'm bringing you a conversation with reporter Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone, who's just written a scorching piece on what's been happening in Namibia, particularly with respect to a company that seems to have claimed on paper that there are billions of barrels of oil on its land, but never actually proven that there's anything there. That never stopped them from drilling, though, right next to a UNESCO's World Heritage site, no less. And those completely unnecessary exploratory wells have caused plenty of environmental damage. Jeff went to Namibia to figure out what the heck has been going on. He's going to talk us through all of it, how it fits in with what we've been seeing in Guyana and how it all relates to the global oil rush after this quick break.

[00:01:25] My name is Jeff Goodell. I am a writer at Rolling Stone and the author of a number of books about energy and climate change.

[00:01:34] We're talking because you just wrote this massive feature about oil exploration in Namibia and a little bit in Botswana and Africa in general. And I am fascinated by the story. So I guess I wanted to know how you first started looking into this. What first popped onto your radar that made you go, Oh, this is something worth looking into?

[00:01:56] Well, I got tipped off by a foundation who told me that there was this drilling going on around the Okavango Delta, which is a UNESCO's World Heritage site. You know, they're interested in wildlife conservation and things. And like you and many journalists, we get pitched stuff all the time. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds great, but, you know, I got lots to do. And right. So I kind of didn't think about it. And then, then I was just sort of Googling around one day and thinking more about it and started to look into it a little bit. And it became really interesting to me very quickly because this company called ReconAfrica, which was based in Vancouver, they're kind of, you know, a small kind of oil and gas exploration company. And there was some really good reporting that had been done by National Geographic that suggested that, you know, maybe this was not all up and up and maybe there was some other game being played here besides straight, straightforward oil and gas drilling and exploration. And it just piqued my interest. And the more I looked into it, the more complex and fascinating it became. And I pitched my editors and they said, Yes, let's go, go have a look. And that's what I did.

[00:03:12] Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to spoil the story for people because I want them to go and read it. But to the extent that you can share a little bit about what you found without without ruining the story for people. Yeah. Can you walk us through what you found when when you got on the ground in Namibia?

[00:03:34] Well, I think, you know, the first thing I should say is, right before I left, I. I called this Harvard geologist named Paul Hoffman, who's a very, very, very one of the most sort of famous geologists in the world as far as geologists are famous. Who who is most known for kind of this idea of snowball Earth, this idea that at one several points in Earth's distant past, it was more or less covered with ice in it. It's a very controversial theory, but he he was the one who kind of proved it. And he proven by studying the rocks in Namibia for about 40 years. And he he knows the rocks in Namibia the way, you know, most people know their children's faces or something. And I called him and he basically said I explained the story to him and I was interested in drilling. Did you have any advice for me about traveling in Namibia and this and that? And he said, you know, there's no oil there. And I said, Well, what do you mean? He said, Whatever they're saying, I know this place and there's basically no oil there. And I was like, Well, then what are they doing? And he said, Well, you know, one thing you're going to learn is that a lot of oil and gas company or companies are better at drilling into their investors wallets than they are into the rocks in the ground.

[00:04:50] And with that, I got on a plane and and went to Namibia. And so I try and my time there was about trying to understand what was going on. If there was no oil there, then what were they doing? And if there was oil, there was this guy, Paul Hofmann, this man who understands Namibia better than anyone. Was he completely wrong and was at a remarkable kind of discovery? They were Reconafrica was claiming there was 120 billion barrels of of oil that had been produced in this basin that they that they had so-called discovered. And as you know, 120 billion is a pretty big number. And so that got all their investors in a tizzy.

[00:05:38] And yeah, I mean that some that would make it bigger than almost any other oil field on earth just to put it in context for people like they're like, hey, we discovered the new Saudi Arabia and no one else existed.

[00:05:57] So the first thing I did when I got there is, you know, one of the things that makes this story different than a lot of other stories is that where the the they this company, Reconafrica, leased about 9 million acres of land in Botswana and Namibia. And a lot of it is very close to the Okavango Delta, which is this UNESCO's World Heritage site, which is a kind of pristine ecosystem that is, you know, renowned for the number of elephants that the urban migrate through there for its wildlife population of lions and, you know, all the sort of big mammals that people pay a lot of money to go on safari to see. But it's also just this, you know, this kind of miraculous place, this delta where the water runs down out of the highlands of Angola and creates this unique ecosystem that is very that is basically unpolluted and untouched. And then that water disappears into the Kalahari Desert and just sort of vanishes. And it's this amazing place. So so the first thing I did was go see this amazing place, which I had never been to before, which know, it was, you know, astonishing and its diversity of wildlife and in its sort of sublime beauty. And the notion that all this was going to get, you know, screwed up and polluted because of these, you know, wildcat explorers who were drilling upstream of this was, you know, pretty shocking in the sense of like, what the hell are we doing? You know, what what is going on here? So it wasn't just the climate aspects of it. It was also just this incredible wonderland of wildlife that was at risk.

[00:07:49] Right. And I think like I think that there's a tendency for people to think, oh, well, if they're drilling, but there's not really any oil, then like, no harm, no foul. Right. But that's very much not true. So can you kind of talk through what impact does the drilling have, irrespective of whether there is actually this large amount of oil to be out there?

[00:08:11] Right. I mean, obviously, if if there were 120 billion barrels of oil there, it would it would turn into, you know, you know, it would there would be drilling everywhere and would turn into, you know, a kind of environmental nightmare. But you're right, a lot of people think, oh, so what's the harm they were exploring for oil? No big deal. They didn't they didn't find it. And so who cares? Well, it matters a lot because an ecosystem like the Okavango Delta is very fragile and it's all built around this sort of flow of water. And and as even drilling these four or five wells that they have drilled, they're you know, they're using drilling muds that have God knows what kind of chemicals in them. They're pumping up water from below that has all kinds of chemicals in it that are not mixed in the surface waters. They're cutting roads through these pristine areas, changing wildlife migration patterns, you know, and then there's the whole sort of economy of drillers and kind of get rich quick people who, you know, invade this area trying to exploit this. And so it's like, you know, even even this level of of modest exploration in a pristine place like that has profound implications.

[00:09:45] Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about this company that is. Exploring in in Namibia. I found that really interesting to again, I think like a lot of people think, oh, it's just the oil majors doing this stuff, but this is a pretty small, pretty new company that. Has kind of pulled off something that's that's sort of shocking, I would say the same that they've managed to convince so many people to believe in this projection. It's one thing if you know X on our shelf says there's 120 billion barrels of oil somewhere. But this this is not one of those companies.

[00:10:31] No, it's not. It's basically, you know, a handful of Vancouver mining financiers headed by this guy named Craig Sankey, who is a Canadian. And, you know, he and and some of the other people, guys, they are all guys and they're all like, you know, middle aged white guys basically, you know, made a little bit of money in fracking in the Permian Basin and in parts of Canada and have basically spent the last ten years trying to kind of export fracking around the world, basically. And, you know, they fracking is a, you know, North American invention that was sort of, you know, exploited here. And these guys figure out, oh, well, we can do that in other places. So they've trotted around to Mexico and France and Poland and other places trying to frack in basins there, and they've been basically shut down in all those places or else the gas fields turned out to be dry or or the gas too difficult to get for whatever reasons. But they've perfected this idea of of, you know, hyping up the possibility of these discoveries and then selling, you know, creating a corporation that they then put on the Vancouver Stock Exchange or some other small exchanges and and hype up investors in retail investors on who are on boards like on Reddit and places like that. And they get a lot of money invested in this by hyping up the possibility of an enormous find in this case in Namibia and Botswana. So it really is just I mean, really, it's a handful of people. When I was in Namibia, I went to the company headquarters. You know, it's like, well, okay, so Reconafrica has got this operation that I'm reporting about. It's drilling high profile drilling operation. I figured they would have a building a like an office, you know, they would be some kind of establishment. And it was basically this like a rented little office at the end of this empty hallway where one guy was sitting in a chair with like Office Depot kind of steel furniture who was in charge of their operations there. And I went in and, you know, said hello and told them who I was. And I was from Rolling Stone. And and, you know, I'd like to go look at the drill sites. And he was at first really friendly to me. It was really sweet. And like, he's like, Oh, great, welcome to maybe all that. And then he said, okay, we'll arrange this. Let me call me back in a couple of a couple of hours and we'll set it up. And I laughed and called him a couple of hours and he was immediately very gruff and like, No, we're not, you know, no, no drill visit. Sorry, we're not cooperating and hung up the phone on me. You know, obviously checked in with somebody and like, no, we're not letting any reporters anywhere near this. But that's the kind of operation it is. It's not a you know, it's not a big company. It's like four guys, you know, who have corralled a bunch of investors, have some money, bought a drilling rig and are punching holes in Namibia.

[00:14:06] It's wild. It's just it's wild that that that's like a thing that you can do.

[00:14:13] And make a lot of money at it.

[00:14:15] Yeah. Yeah. I make a lot of money out of it. Even if there's nothing coming out of those wells, have they? What's kind of the status of of this project right now?

[00:14:30] Well, they've, you know, they've drilled three or four exploratory wells. They haven't really they claim to have found what they call a working petroleum system. But all of the petroleum engineers I've talked to who've looked at their data said it's not a working petroleum system. Their stock price is, you know, under a dollar and has been under a dollar for a long time. You know, it was up around seven or eight, I think even $9 for a while a year ago, which was when all the insiders cashed out. You know, this company was worth at a certain point, something like a market cap of like $2 billion, even though, you know, they never found any oil and their office was nothing more than a, you know, steel chair in in a lonely little building in Runda Namibia. You know, I don't know where it's going to go. They they looked like they have enough operating cash to get to go through another quarter or two. But a lot of the main investors have already moved on to other companies. And even the key player, Craig Sankey, who is the sort of. The man behind this. He's moved on. He's involved in some other companies. So I basically think they're going to fade away. I think that, you know, they're just going to vanish in this sort of petroleum haze. I think that after several years of promising and promising and promising, I think even their, you know, just cult like, investors are losing patience with them. And, you know, they've been talking about it, you know, a joint venture, somebody one of the big oil majors coming in and and, you know, buying them out or buying out a portion of their operation and which would certainly happen if if there was 120 billion barrels of oil.

[00:16:29] Would have it would be a pretty good shape. But the fact that nobody has after all this time is pretty good evidence that even insiders don't believe what they're selling.

[00:16:41] Yeah. Yeah. Do you is there any sense that they have been able to for some period of time at least, kind of use the discoveries of oil in the southern part of Namibia, where it shares the border with South Africa? Yeah. Do you think that they've been they've been kind of. Using that to convince people that, oh, yeah, there's oil and gas up here too.

[00:17:10] Oh, totally. Oh, yeah. They're totally using. And then also, you know, Shore has been made a couple of there's been a couple of big offshore discoveries in Namibia, also Namibia. For a long time it thought they had no oil or no no gas. They were not that they you know, Angola to the north as well. And they just thought this was something that, you know, was not available to them. And then a couple of these big. A couple of these big offshore discoveries came on, which do seem real. And then some other discoveries in the southern part of the country. But, you know, Africa, as you know, is at this sort of turning point, right? Right. Are they going to develop in this old like, you know, 19th century, you know, resource curse kind of development path, or are they going to move in a new direction? And I think Namibia is really at the kind of fulcrum of that decision.

[00:18:11] Yeah. I want to talk to you more about that because I feel like Namibia is in this really interesting place. It does. It reminds me a lot of Diana, which we've been looking at a lot for the last year or so in that Namibia also kind of has this reputation as like a real leader in conservation and doing so much around wildlife preservation and all of these things. And now they're at the precipice of maybe becoming a big oil and gas producer. And I'm curious about what you found in terms of what I don't know what people think about it there, how the government is reacting, how people on the ground think about it. I had someone I talked to someone just the other day said, you know, for a long time, folks in Global South countries thought about climate change as a global North problem, a problem that was created by the global North and should be solved by it, which is not necessarily untrue. But unfortunately, everybody is going to be impacted by it, too, right, in these countries. More than than most. So, yeah, I'm just curious what you saw in terms of people kind of grappling with all of those things at once.

[00:19:24] Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, I think it's a really, really important question. And I think probably maybe one of the most sort of important kind of questions in the whole energy climate debate that's happening in the world right now. And it's at the center of the loss and damage conversations that are happening, you know, with the IPCC and this question of what does the global North owe the global South? And and because, you know, obviously we, the global North, have created this problem of climate change. We're the ones who have spent a hundred years dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. And as you chronicled better than anybody with oil majors like ExxonMobil, knowing what they were doing. And, you know, there's no question about who's responsible for this. Right. Right. And and, you know, when you travel in and when I traveled in Namibia and Botswana, you know, I mean, it's energy poverty is very real. I mean, you know, it's really important. And in countries in Namibia, in Botswana, for more people to get access to energy for all kinds of very obvious reasons. And, you know, there is a legitimate argument to be made that, look, you know, that I've been at a meeting with the Namibia's drilling, the head of their sort of drilling operations oversight agency said to me, basically, look, you guys, you meaning America, have look what you've done. You know, you drilled everything and you know, look what's going on now. We just okay. Drilling and in the Willow Project and in Alaska, look what we're doing in the Gulf. I mean, like you have no right to tell us, like not to drill. You know, you have no moral standing, right?

[00:21:11] You stop first, you know? Right. Yeah.

[00:21:16] Yeah. That's really and that's really true. I mean, it's really true. I mean, there's we do have no moral standing to come in there and say, you know, shame on you. However, what's very powerful that's happening there and what I encountered on the ground was a lot of, you know, African activists, African sort of, you know, new energy thinkers who are saying, look, forget like what you know, people in the U.S. want us to do or care is like for our own good. You know, we need to go on a different path because the future is not oil and gas. These things are going to turn out to be stranded assets. They're going to screw up our country, they're going to pollute. They're going do all the things that we can see has happened to the U.S. and to other countries who have gone down the path of fossil fuel development. We're smarter than that. The advantages is to go on this new and different path. And Namibia is a great example because Namibia's solar resource, for example, is just phenomenal. I mean, it's better than California and Nevada. I mean, it's really they have the real gold mine or the real 120 billion barrels of oil in Namibia is not in the ground, it's in the sun. And the possibilities of that are huge. And they're also doing things very innovative things like. Green hydrogen development, that they have a big project going on that is, I think it's $9 billion or something of investment that is very progressive and, you know, a kind of step towards the sort of new energy economy also. So they're at this sort of, you know, fulcrum of this of this change. But but one of the things the Reconafrica story shows is, you know, is the ability of the oil and gas industry, world players to, you know, access political officials to to get okays to do things. They know how to pull the levers. And, you know, they know how to, you know, pay off the right people and, you know, get the development going even in ways that, you know, even if it's not the sort of smartest path or the most democratic path or the one that most people in the country want, they know how to get it done, which is the same stories you saw in Ghana and we see in America.

[00:23:42] Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, there's this dual problem which you pointed to before, Like it's not just the long term potential impacts around climate, but also the near term impacts of air and water pollution and the potential for oil spills and all that kind of thing too. Did you get like did you get a sense of how well or not the the Namibian government is positioned to to actually, like regulate an oil and gas industry?

[00:24:18] No, I mean, my sense is that, you know. They they are, you know, children in a sandbox in dealing with these big experienced oil and gas players, even like Reconafrica. I mean, Reconafrica is, you know, in the classic way kind of trying to exploit this in a way. And they're talking about how, you know, they are talking about how they're drilling mud and they're drilling fluids are 100% organic. Right? Is if it's like Gwyneth Paltrow, it's like it's hilarious, you know?

[00:25:00] Wow. Drilling mud or a mask. Oh, wow. That's really interesting. Is there a sense, like in Guyana, there's pretty much this idea of like, oh, well, you know, oil and gas is going to make us rich and, you know, solve all of our development financing problems. And in a very big way, it actually gets talked about all the time there, about like that oil money is going to pay for climate adaptation, which is such like really clear example of what happens when the global north does not step up and do what it should. On on climate, it's like, okay, now we've kind of abandoned these countries to. Rely on oil companies to pay for climate adaptation. And the tradeoff is more drilling and all of that. So anyway, I don't know. Is that something that you saw in Namibia as well, where it's like, well, this might be a problem, but it'll bring in money and we need that money to deal with all of these other things.

[00:26:08] Yeah, I mean, that's clearly a big part of the sort of pitch that a company like ReconAfrica makes, although in this case they don't really talk that much, at least that I saw about climate related adaptation and money. It's more just like, you know, economic development. You know, it's like we're going to bring jobs to these poor people. We're going to, you know, provide clean drinking water. You know, we are a, you know, experienced professionals. We do this right. We're not a fly by night organization. And, you know, we care about Namibia, blah, blah, blah. You know, they're very good at, you know, pitching this as the path for economic prosperity and growth. Right. And then you go there and you walk around and you talk to people in the villages and things around there. And and yes, they drilled a couple of drinking wells that cost them two or $3,000. And that has helped a couple of the villages. And I visited some of these wells and people were happy that they were there. But it's like, you know, buying the local soccer team, new shirts or something. I mean, it's like, you know, it they know how to do build up this kind of goodwill at a very cheap cost. And you ask them about, you know, when I asked people about, you know, employment and jobs and, you know, they would hire someone to like, hold the flag on a dirt road for a day or two and pay them less than a dollar or something. And then that would be the end of it. And, you know, clearly all of this drilling stuff is, you know, everything. There was Halliburton. I mean, this is all imported stuff, imported engineers. The the actual, you know, job possibilities for local people. There are very, very small you know, the oil contracts, most of the money is, you know, going out of the country, the money that's not going into the hands of sort of corrupt officials. It's moving the country. You know, this is it's it's a very transparent game that anybody like you who has looked at this for a long time knows exactly how it's played. And they're really experts at it and they're really good at it. And, you know, they had that playbook down.

[00:28:33] Yeah. Yeah. What about sort of civil society groups in Namibia? So, you know, like nonprofits and commissions, but also journalism, you know, government watchdog groups, things like that. Are any of those folks kind of starting to look at this stuff critically?

[00:28:57] Yeah. I mean, first of all, Namibia has some really good journalism. They have the paper. The Namibian has done some really good coverage of Reconafrica and of the problems with drilling in these fragile areas. So they do have that. There they are building. There is a growing, you know, activist community. Fridays for the future. Other organizations like that have a real presence. One of the things that really caught my eye and first beginning to explore this story and deciding to actually go there and write about it, was seeing some video of some of the sort of community meetings where local activists were challenging some of records, officials who would come in and, you know, describe this these drilling projects to them. And the local activists really kind of got up in arms about it and really challenged them. I thought, oh, wow, this is really interesting. There's a lot of pushback here.

[00:30:01] That's really interesting is the link is the is the government. Yeah. Like, how is the government sort of supporting that or not or more on the side of oil companies or sort of neutral? What's the relationship like there?

[00:30:18] Yeah, well, I mean, it's it's complex, you know. The the Namibian mining minister who I a guy named Tom a window who had a kind of community meeting in Rwanda, Namibia, which is the sort of largest town near the drilling sites. I was there when you had this community meeting and I attended it. And and, you know, he's very smart guy, very sophisticated, you know, But very clearly, like, if there's oil here, we're going to develop it. This is our rights. We have a right to develop our resources. You know, we want to do this and we want and, you know, we want to do this right. So they're kind of progressive in that sense. You know, this is they the question is, is will that would that actually happen? What would doing it right mean in a place like that? And, you know, it's like, can you drill in for oil and gas the right way in Yosemite Valley? I mean, no, I mean, you can't. Right? There's if you're going to drill for oil and gas in somebody's valley, it doesn't there's no right or wrong way. It's a disaster any way you look at it. Right. And so same kind of thing with the Okavango Delta. It's like there's no right or wrong way to drill here. You just this should this should not this should not be happening, right? I mean, if you value this, this ecosystem and this this planet the way that a lot of people do. So So I think that, you know, what's interesting in this story is that, you know, by choosing to drill in this, we're very close to this fragile area. They they really kind of kicked off a kind of attention and got people like me and activists and others to say, hey, what the hell are you doing? What is going on here that I think they regret? Because I think that they would like this to have just gone through in a much quieter way. And there's some of the is other drilling and exploration going on in Namibia that I'm not writing about and you've probably never heard of and I've probably never heard of. And you know, that is going on quietly under the radar. But these guys were bold and stupid and they just arrogant and just thought, Oh, what the hell, We're going to drill right next to the El Camino Delta. And lo and behold, people don't like that, including a lot of Namibians who are, you know, we're marching in the streets and holding up flags. So we know what's really interesting, too, is that you really feel or I really felt when I was there compared to covering a similar kind of, you know, meetings and activism in the U.S. is fear. There's a real fear there of what the oil companies could do to them. There's a lot of I talked to a number of activists who said, you know, I'm talking to you, but, you know, if I disappear next week, you know, you need to know, you know, who did this or who's who is where to look, first kind of thing. Right. And so you really feel the kind of courage of speaking out there in a way that, you know, I don't really feel when I covered similar kinds of events here in the U.S. or Western Europe or something.

[00:33:40] Yeah, Yeah, That's interesting. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you talking to me about it more. It's a great story. We will link to it in the show notes, send everybody over to read it, and definitely we'll be following to see what becomes of ReconAfrica.

[00:34:04] Yeah, I think I think they're they're like a little soap bubble that's going to like pop, you know, right. Really soon here. I don't think they're going to be around too long. But you know, who knows? Who knows?

[00:34:14] Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it. And yeah, looking forward to seeing whatever you do next.

[00:34:25] So that's it for this time. Next week we are back in Guyana for the final episode of this season. Don't miss it. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

S3, Ep7 Transcription

What's happening in Guyana isn't just happening there. All over the globe, oil companies are racing to tap as many of the remaining fossil fuel reserves as they can. This week, we're joined by Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Goodell for a story about what the global oil rush looks like in another part of the world: Namibia.

New Oil Colonialism

S3, Ep8 | The Turning Point