Guyana Is Adding Oil Faster Than Almost Anyone Outside OPEC. Its Biggest Risk Is a Boardroom, Not a Reservoir

Five years after first oil, Guyana produces about 645,000 barrels a day, all of it from a single offshore licence, the Stabroek block. Between 2020 and 2023 the country added an average of 98,000 barrels a day each year, making it the third-fastest growing oil producer outside OPEC over that period according to the US Energy Information Administration. In 2022 its economy grew by 62.3 per cent in real terms, the highest rate in the world that year according to the International Monetary Fund figures the EIA cites.

Few petroleum provinces have moved from discovery to this scale so quickly. The interesting questions now are less geological than institutional: who will control the block, how fast the partners will develop it, and what Guyana does with the money. ExxonMobil made the first significant discovery in 2015 at what is now the Liza project. Since then, Exxon and its partners, Hess and China National Offshore Oil Corporation, have made more than 30 further discoveries in the block.

Each project uses a floating production, storage and offloading vessel, built to a standard design and installed on a schedule that has so far been met with unusual reliability. The EIA's near-term outlook expects growth in liquids supply outside OPEC+ of 1.4 million barrels a day in 2024 and 1.1 million in 2025. Most of that comes from the United States, but Canada, Brazil and Guyana are each expected to add about 0.3 million barrels a day through 2025.

Guyana's barrels have particular value because they are low-cost and relatively light, sweet crude, attractive to many refiners. Floating production also means each new project adds a discrete, predictable increment of supply. The EIA expects Canadian growth to come largely from oil sands output once the Trans Mountain expansion opens, roughly tripling the takeaway capacity available to the producing region. Chevron agreed to acquire Hess, which holds 30 per cent of the block.