ST. GEORGE’S, GRENADA, October 10 — Grenada has proposed establishing a trilateral commission to settle maritime boundaries with Venezuela and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a move announced just as the Dickon Mitchell administration weighs a sensitive US request for military presence on the island.

Nazim Burke, chairman of Grenada’s Hydrocarbon Technical Working Group, revealed the proposal during a public consultation Thursday night, explaining that Prime Minister Mitchell has formally approached the presidents of Venezuela and St. Vincent to establish a joint commission comprising “three persons from each of the three countries and a chairman from a third country.”

The timing is particularly delicate.

The announcement comes as Grenada faces pressure from Washington to support its position against Venezuela, including a controversial request to deploy radar equipment and military personnel at Maurice Bishop International Airport—the same facility the US cited as justification for its 1983 invasion.

Burke emphasized that the maritime boundary demarcation is critical to Grenada’s oil exploration ambitions.

“You can’t go about leasing out maritime space to people without knowing where your boundary is,” he stated.

While Grenada completed maritime boundary delimitation with Trinidad and Tobago in 2012, boundaries with Venezuela and St. Vincent “have never been clearly defined,” Burke noted.

The proposal is currently under consideration by all three governments.

Dr. Gilbert Yevi, the Technical Working Group’s lead consultant, provided encouraging updates on hydrocarbon exploration, saying Grenada has obtained “very good quality” seismic data from GOX covering the area from Grenada to Trinidad and Tobago.

“We are six months, plus or minus four to six months, away from saying yes, there is hydrocarbon here, there is hydrocarbon there,” Dr. Yevi told stakeholders, adding that the team needs to determine “what size of quantity is it, is it commercially viable, what is the value if we were to exploit it?”

One exploratory well already drilled in Grenada’s 28,500 square kilometers of maritime acreage showed “indications of hydrocarbons,” though no commercial discovery has been confirmed.

Currently, 10% of Grenada’s waters are licensed to Global Petroleum Group, while 90% remains unexplored.

The government is finalizing revenue-sharing agreements with seismic companies TGS and GOX, and a memorandum of understanding with Trinidad’s National Gas Company is expected to be signed when Trinidad’s Prime Minister visits in early November.