900,000 barrels, 900,000 nightmares

Aug 17, 2025 Editorial, News

Kaieteur News – The Yellowtail Development is now up and ready to roll. The One Guyana FPSO has a daily production capacity of 250,000 barrels per day (bpd) (bpd), which could push Guyana’s official output to 900,000 bpd. Now that there is total capacity for 900,000 bpd, ExxonMobil and partners will waste no time in ratcheting up production, while oil demand is still ‘strong.’ In an oil-producing country that was at 650,000 bpd, and now equipped to rise to 900,000 bpd, the expectation is that its citizens would be living well. It is a certainty that Guyanese, now the envy of the world, the center of worldwide attraction, are enjoying the kind of standard of living and quality of life that First World countries take for granted.

Five years after oil production began in Guyana, two out of every five Guyanese are still trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It has been a grueling struggle due to a suffocating cost-of-living environment. Prices for basic food items started out high, and keeps going higher. The irony is profound: the more that Guyana increases its daily oil production capacity, the more Guyanese struggle with the pressures of crippling prices.

Almost a million bpd in a country with fewer than a million for its population, and 40 percent, some insist that it is closer to 50 percent, of citizens are forced to economize to survive. People can tighten their belts for clothes and leisure, but they cannot do the same for long with food and medicine, and the monthly bills. In a country ready to produce 900,000 bpd, there are Guyanese who are left with no choice but to scramble to manage on US$5.50 (GY$1100) a day. Guyana is producing more barrels of oil per day than it has people, and those same people are now forced to live with three feared nightmares. They are what basic food items they can access, how much they have to offer their children to eat, and what little would be left back for them to consume.

In the minds of the leaders of the PPPC Government, they have done exceedingly well for all Guyanese. So well, that they are overtaken by humility or, most likely shame, to publish the statistics that means so much to Guyanese, because they pinch so sharply. What are the real food inflation numbers? How many are still forced to join the two-job line, or are below the poverty line, because they are locked in the nightmare of $60,000 a month minimum wage, since June 2022. We at this publication think we have an idea of how these Guyanese have managed to survive that $60,000 monthly minimum wage for three years, while food prices and prices overall continue to climb steeply. The Guyanese living with that harrowing nightmare know what it is to do so. How many are there, in a country that was producing 650,000 barrels of oil daily, and is now flexing its muscles to balloon to 900,000 bpd?

Guyanese are appreciative of the new roads that the PPPC Government has made among its bigger priorities. The oil money made that possible, and it’s is a nice travel, in some parts. The human condition and human challenge are how to find sufficient money for proper daily meals, since they can’t consume either oil or roads. At the soon-to-be 900,000 bpd, no Guyanese should be struggling with the nightmare of how to pay their monthly bills. ExxonMobil and Guyana’s contractor class, and the less than one percent class of Guyanese having it extremely good are already busy counting the additional profits they will rake in. The have nots in Guyana already know, and will continue to know, what it is to live with poverty’s nightmares amid the profits of foreign oil companies and local political cabals.

More than half the world would love to live in a country that has the capacity to produce 900,000 bpd, with individual prosperity imagined. Almost half of Guyana’s population would sharply differ, given the unending nightmares that they somehow endure. Oil should mean so much more to all Guyanese. For half of them, it has been a nightmare that their oil wealth should have ended.

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Editorial, ExxonMobil, Guyana Oil, oil, Yellowtail Development

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900,000 barrels, 900,000 nightmares

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