Barrels, then more barrels

Nov 10, 2025 Editorial, News

(Kaieteur News) – Guyana’s oil riches are gushing out from under the seabed, in the manner of those spouting geysers in Yellowstone National Park in the US, or one of those wonders in New Zealand.

The more the vast and powerful underwater fountains in Guyana’s Stabroek Block flow with laden cargoes of oil to the surface, the more the state of this country’s peoples is subject to harder and harder criticism.

The numbers are present and they don’t lie, plus there is another factor that contributes heavily: as more barrels of oil are produced daily, there are no deniers of that fact now written in the golden black fingers of oil.

Daily oil production in Guyana has increased by leaps and bounds. In the early days of local oil production, there was the basic level of 270,000 barrels a day that climbed to 450,000 barrels a day in quick time, as the wells got going and settled into their stride. From that production platform, the thresholds went to 650,000 barrels of daily output. In more recent times, that number has quietly crept up to 770,000 barrels per day of production, and then there was the incredible. In October, daily production soared to a staggering 938,000 barrels a day. From not quite three quarters of a million barrels a day to just within reach of that coveted number and distinction of a million barrels of oil produced daily.

Can this be where oil developments and that level of oil production are in Guyana? Believe it, for that is where the numbers say they are, and there is no objecting to them, for there is no fault in them. And, while daily oil production in Guyana climbs and climbs, like a supersonic warplane, into the stratosphere, can this be where a great number of Guyanese are, trapped in poverty, having as their companion a partner called hopelessness? Believe that also, for there are those hard-hit citizens who don’t have, who don’t know where to turn, and who don’t know what to do, to ease the daily torments of their condition. This is the puzzle that is not a puzzle, a contradiction that is obvious, and which again cannot be denied or dismissed, since the poor are not disappearing from Guyana’s map.

The more that the daily production of oil rises and rises in Guyana, there is the grim reality of impoverished Guyanese falling and falling lower and lower. Those who are categorised as the ‘have nots’ in Guyana are falling behind, in the crunch of prices, in what is for them a barren economic environment. How does a worker live, feed a family, on $60,000 a month in a Guyana where prices far outstrip earnings, and not from one job alone? During the wild moments of the recent political craze, many big promises were made. Though the days are still early, the people are still waiting, and their circumstances are so blighted that even an announcement could do much to ease their fears and despair.

Why is this happening in Guyana today, where today Guyana is a country that produces almost three quarters of million barrels of oil a day? When a country with less than a million mouths to feed can come close to producing as much as a million barrels of oil a day and still hold citizens not having enough to eat, that should be made into a crime. Not just a misdemeanor type of crime, but it is what qualifies as a high governmental and leadership crime against the people.

Poor Guyanese are fed a steady diet rich in infrastructure projects estimated to cost billions of US dollars. Those projects promise a considerable return to this country, but there are lacking in any meaning to the Guyanese who are hungry, and grapple with the challenges of taking care of their loved ones. Daily oil production in Guyana reaches higher and higher altitudes, and there is the savage irony of battalions of Guyanese who find themselves in a deeper and deeper financial hole. They can’t cope, they don’t have much hope left. There were those political promises made during the campaigns, that if kept could bring a little easing, a little only.

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barrels, Editorial, oil, oil riches, Stabroek Block

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Barrels, then more barrels

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