Is there sweet crude oil in Gallon Jug?

And the government’s windfall tax on the petroleum industry in 2008 has fallen short since the cost of a barrel of oil has gone below the tax threshold of ninety U.S. dollars. But the government still has royalties that it collects from Belize Natural Energy. The Prime Minister announced on Wednesday that revenues are down by at least sixty percent. So the government is hoping that other avenues of revenue collection will spring up. There has been speculation that black gold, sweet crude oil, has been gushing out at a new location. Gallon Jug, located behind Blue Creek in Orange Walk, is known mostly for Barry Bowen’s Gallon Jug Coffee, but the area of over seven hundred and fifty thousand acres, has been the site of the latest drilling. The Prime Minister said that the first drilling operation did not yield but a more promising one is soon to start.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“I’ve been told that the second well that is to be dug, which is fairly close to the first well, has in terms of the data, an even higher potential than the first well which causes me to say two things. Well, it better be higher because since the first well showed nothing. And then if that is so, why unnu neva dig deh first? But I am not an expert and they have their own reasons. When the first well was dug and the data was retrieved, the data was analyzed abroad and there was a suggestion that perhaps something had been missed and that some pockets of pressure might well have contained oil and gas. They went back and I believe what they found was salt water, which was a hell of a downer. So now it appears that that chapter is closed where it concerns the first well. What has held up by little, the digging of the second well, is the fact that the rains had messed up the terrains and they needed the ground to dry out before they could do their thing. Drilling of that second well is supposed to start very early next month or by the middle of next month and as I’ve said now that you’ve brought all this to light, all of us will be keeping our fingers and toes crossed that the data doesn’t fool us and that in fact, the kinds of large reserves that that data suggests might be there, do materialize.”