The Surinamese Production Sharing Contract: how a small country writes the rules for a big discovery

Not long ago, Suriname was known for its bauxite and gold and barely registered on the global energy map. Today it sits on one of the most closely watched offshore frontiers in the world. Billion dollar discoveries lie off its coast, and the interest is at its peak, perhaps with a little sprinkle of hype thrown in.

The question that interests me as a tax lawyer is not how much oil is down there. It is how a small country writes the rules for it. How do you design a legal and fiscal regime that protects national sovereignty and still draws in global capital?

The book

That is what my book is about. The Surinamese Production Sharing Contract traces how Suriname turned a colonial concession system into a modern PSC framework, built around the Staatsolie Model PSC of 2021. I take the reader through its fiscal architecture of royalty, cost recovery, profit oil and tax, its stabilisation regime under the 2018 State Decree, and the way local content, transparency and environmental responsibility are written into the contract itself. Its legal roots reach back to Indonesia's pioneering 1966 PSC, and that lineage still shapes the model in use today. More importantly, it becomes clear just how much the Surinamese PSC depends on adequate taxation. Without it, the framework fails.

The book draws on many years of work in oil and gas law and taxation, much of it inside the region rather than observed from a distance. It is written for the people who actually have to move in that environment: investors weighing a bid, operators negotiating terms, advisers and officials who need to know where the contract gives and where it holds firm.

So people keep asking me how to navigate that regulatory environment. Fine. I'll tell you how, in the words of Gordon Gekko: buy my book.

The Surinamese Production Sharing Contract is available on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/06ZnCEW0