Firm pays over K2.2bil to State

By CLARISSA MOI
EXXONMOBIL has paid the Government more than K2.2 billion in taxes, royalties and development levies from the PNG LNG (liquefied natural gas) project last year, ExxonMobil PNG Ltd managing director Andrew Barry says.
He told The National yesterday that low oil prices was one of the challenges they encountered last year.
“Unfortunately, gold (price) is very high, while oil and gas is very low, so the amount of money that the project will deliver to the country will be lower this year,” Barry said.
“Not because of anything that we have done, but because of price situation in the international community.” While providing an update of the PNG LNG operations during Covid-19 pandemic, Barry said operations had not been affected as the company had put in place security measures and safety protocols which had been carefully followed.
Barry added that the Covid-19 had no significant impact on the PNG LNG operations and exports were normal. “We have been ensuring that we were working within all the procedures that the National Control Centre (NCC) is leading and we’ve implemented all of those with our own safety standards so the LNG operations are operating as normal with no impact because of Covid-19,” Barry said.
He said this was a testimony to the company’s employees and contractors and also because of the cooperation of the Government that had ensured normal operations.
“We haven’t had any significant impacts on our shipping,” Barry said.
“There has been little movement around but alternatively, it hasn’t impacted our production.
“So delivering our cargoes have been continuing as normal.”