Guyana is a former British colony on the north-eastern coast of South America. It gained independence from Britain in 1966 and has a population of around 830,000. In the early 2000s it was one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Its capital is Georgetown.
A series of massive oil discoveries 190km off Guyana's Atlantic coast, led by a consortium headed by ExxonMobil, have transformed the country. The first of an estimated 11bn recoverable barrels arrived onshore in 2019. Guyana is now on track to pump more oil per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world. Its GDP has quintupled in five years, according to the IMF.
Oil revenues are expected to reach about $2.5bn in 2025 and $10bn by 2030—roughly $20,000 per voter. Guyana has sought advice from Norway on managing its wealth and established a sovereign wealth fund, worth $3.6bn and growing by tens of millions a month. One stated goal is to ensure that "volatility in natural resource revenues does not lead to volatile public spending".
Much of central Georgetown remains a maze of ramshackle wooden houses. Power cuts are common outside the capital. The government has focused its early spending on infrastructure: a vast new bridge over the Demerara river on the outskirts of Georgetown, built by a Chinese construction company, is nearly finished; 61km of highway have been built in the past four years; and work has begun to pave "The Trail", a red-dirt track running more than 450km to connect Guyana with Brazil.
Guyanese politics have historically been divided along racial lines: the People's Progressive Party (PPP) draws support mainly from the Indian-Guyanese community, while the People's National Congress Reform (PNCR) is backed mostly by Afro-Guyanese voters.
In the September 2025 election, President Irfaan Ali of the PPP won a second term, with the party increasing its majority to 36 of the 65 seats in the legislature. The main surprise was the rise of WIN, a party established only in June 2025, which won 16 seats and overtook the PNCR to become the official opposition. WIN is led by Azruddin Mohamed, a 36-year-old heir to a gold-trading dynasty whom the United States has sanctioned for alleged tax evasion, corruption and gold-smuggling. He presents himself as a Robin Hood figure, sometimes using private funds to help the poor. For the first time, both the president and the leader of the opposition are of Indian descent, which may leave some Afro-Guyanese feeling excluded.
In 2025 Chevron completed its $60bn takeover of Hess, a smaller rival with big assets in Guyana. According to Hess's pre-merger filings, its production cost per Guyanese barrel was less than $7—far cheaper than the breakeven price of over $80 for the main Venezuelan projects, according to Wood Mackenzie. Guyana is by far the biggest component of Chevron's $7bn offshore investment budget for 2026.
The conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, which pushed oil prices to around $100 per barrel (up from an average of $69 in 2025), has supercharged Guyana's oil revenues. Weekly revenues rose from about $370m to $623m. Two-thirds of Guyana's oil goes to Europe, which pays fat premiums; factoring in a $10 per barrel premium, Guyana's war bonus tops 90%. If prices stay near $100 per barrel in 2026, the oilfields will generate some $33bn in revenue—three-quarters more than predicted before the war.
The government receives only 14.5% of the value of each barrel, with the ExxonMobil-led consortium taking the rest. However, the price spike means the firms' historic costs are on track to be paid off by the end of 2026, a year early, at which point the government's take rises to 52%.
ExxonMobil is pushing to boost output by 2.5% to 940,000 barrels per day. Each of the consortium's four existing projects is operated by a $2bn floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO). A fifth FPSO is being rushed into service a year ahead of schedule; a sixth is under construction; a seventh is targeted for 2028, also a year early. In March 2026 the company submitted plans for an eighth project—the first in Guyana producing natural gas—and said it would file for a ninth within a year.
Fossil-fuel revenue accounted for about half of the annual budget in 2025 (comparable to Azerbaijan), and oil production comprised three-quarters of GDP (a higher share than Libya). The cost of food and housing has increased by 75% since 2021. The oil industry poaches the best workers. A flagship project to bring natural gas ashore to replace oil-burning power plants is years behind schedule and six times over budget, partly because it was sited in an area with unsuitable ground conditions for political reasons. Winston Jordan, a former finance minister, says the sovereign wealth fund should save the windfall and more besides to curb public spending.
Venezuela claims much of Guyanese territory as its own—an area it calls Guayana Esequiba, bigger than Greece and making up roughly two-thirds of Guyana. Specifically Venezuela claims the Essequibo region, 160,000 square kilometres of rainforest and villages on its eastern border with a population of some 140,000. Guyana says the border was settled over a century ago, by a 1899 tribunal of two American, two British and one Russian judge. Only in 1962, as Guyana approached independence, did Venezuela demur. Since 2023 Venezuela has included the disputed area as a Venezuelan state on official maps and in May 2025 held a vote for a governor of the territory over which it has no control. The United States firmly backs Guyana on the issue; it flew two military jets over Irfaan Ali's re-inauguration to emphasise the point. On May 4th 2026 the International Court of Justice opened hearings on the dispute, having ruled in 2018 and 2023 that it has jurisdiction. A final ruling is expected within months.
The capture of Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 led to resumed exploration in previously restricted portions of the Stabroek Block, the huge field 200km into the Atlantic from which Guyana gets its hydrocarbons.
The covers of this book are too far apart.