Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The first discovery of petroleum and gas deposits in Belize was made by Belize Natural Energy Ltd. in 2005 when the first well in Spanish Lookout began producing. Belize National Energy (BNE) has seen its production reach 5,000 barrels per day.
BNE began looking for oil in Belize in 2002. Spearheaded by two Irish women and a Belizean engineer , the small company found oil after most of the major oil companies had tried and failed over the past 50 years. Photo – Belize oil pumping station at Spanish Lookout.
One of the women, Susan Morrice, is a Denver-based geologist with two decades of experience in Belize.
CHx Capital, a backer of the discovery play, is headed by Denver oilman and Alex Cranberg. Cranberg is known as a savvy investor – and also as Morrice’s husband at the time – they are now divorced.
The other woman, Sheila McCaffrey, came from outside the industry to become eventual chairman of the operating company. Another founder, Jean Cornec, did work in the 1980s identifying Belize’s stratigraphy. Paul Marriott, a British rig contractor, headed the drilling operations. Today Marriot is a big player in the Belize petroleum logistical support services sector.
The biggest believer in the country’s petroleum potential, Mike Usher, was a Belize engineer who died before the Spanish Lookout drilling began.
The discovery well and two confirmations – Usher 1, Usher 2 and Usher 3 — were named in his honor.
David King, a professor in the geology department at Auburn University, has conducted stratigraphic studies in Belize.
An overview paper, “Stratigraphy of Belize North of the 17th Parallel,” by King, Kevin Pope and Lucille Petruny, appeared in the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions in 2004.
King referred to Belize as “a real puzzle box” in terms of geology. “There is no formal stratigraphy in Belize. It’s all informal. Cornec himself says all the units are informal,” he said. For a lot of the units, the type sections are just not there anymore,” King added.
In general, south Belize is dominated by the Maya Mountains, a rugged plateau with a thick section of deformed and metamorphosed Carboniferous-Permian sedimentary and volcanic strata, according to King.
A thin section of Paleocene-Pleistocene carbonates comprises most of the coastal plain in north Belize. A moderately thick section of Mesozoic strata, mostly carbonates, is found in the subsurface and in outcrops near the mountains.
In north Belize, the Lower Cretaceous Hill Bank formation appears as a shallow shelf carbonate unit that developed across the area before subsidence of the Chiapas-Peten Basin, according to King.
The Hill Bank, consisting of porous, tan to gray limestones and dolostones, may be equivalent to the lowermost Coban formation and the San Ricardo in Guatemala. The interbedded limestones, dolostones, shales and anhydrites of the Yalbac formation represent sedimentation on the eastern margin of the Chiapas-Peten Basin, which began subsiding during Early to Middle Cretaceous, King wrote.
In northern Belize, the Yalbac thickens to more than 3,200 feet, as shown by well control. King et al. believe the Yalbac is probably equivalent to the upper Coban formation and lower beds of the Campur formation in Guatemala.
Most of Belize’s 8,867 square miles of territory and much of the waters offshore have been allocated out in petroleum concessions to 18 different companies with a range of foreign shareholders from as close as the USA and as far off as Taiwan and even a local gambling den.
Belize Natural Energy (BNE) has one of those 18 contracts, and it remains the only company producing and exporting oil from Belize, since it found oil in Belize.
Apart from having a 36% stake in BNE’s half-million acre concession area within the Belize and Cayo Districts, it also has interest in the Toledo block of US Capital, as well as the West Bay block in Orange Walk.
Princess Petroleum Limited, belonging to the owners of the Pri