Some neighbors make no noise and move faster than you do. That’s what has been happening with Guyana, which has just crossed a threshold few would have bet on a decade ago: 1 billion barrels of light and medium crude extracted since 2019. The figure comes from an analysis by Juan Szabo and Luis Pacheco, two former PDVSA managers who know how to scrutinize other people’s oil wells.
The figure is no mere statistical ornament. It’s a snapshot of a country that built its oil engine with ExxonMobil as its main partner and now pumps close to 900,000 barrels a day, with its sights set on 1,100,000 bpd by the end of 2026, when the Uaru project comes online. To put that in perspective: Guyana would then be almost neck and neck with Venezuela, which currently produces between 1,200,000 and 1,230,000 barrels a day—its best showing since February 2019.