The south­ern Caribbean has gen­er­at­ed sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est from the in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy in­dus­try over the past decade, dri­ven in par­tic­u­lar by the un­prece­dent­ed ex­plo­ration suc­cess and ramp up of pro­duc­tion in Guyana. In 2024, Guyana over­took T&T in terms of hy­dro­car­bon pro­duc­tion on a bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lence ba­sis. The ma­jor­i­ty of T&T’s pro­duc­tion is nat­ur­al gas, while Guyana’s pro­duc­tion has been all crude oil. Mean­while, Suri­name has main­tained a small vol­ume of oil pro­duc­tion from on­shore, while it has had suc­cess mir­ror­ing Guyana’s in terms of ex­plo­ration suc­cess off­shore (though no pro­duc­tion off­shore yet).

T&T has been com­mer­cial­ly pro­duc­ing crude oil since 1908. Over time the coun­try al­so start­ed mon­etis­ing its nat­ur­al gas re­sources, which led to the cre­ation of world-class am­mo­nia, methanol and LNG fa­cil­i­ties. For a long time, T&T was the pri­ma­ry hy­dro­car­bon pro­duc­er in the Caribbean.

Guyana’s crude oil pro­duc­tion has sky­rock­et­ed since pro­duc­tion be­gan in 2019. The Liza dis­cov­ery was made by Exxon­Mo­bil in 2015 and since then the US en­er­gy ma­jor has made over 30 dis­cov­er­ies in the Stabroek block. These dis­cov­er­ies have led to six off­shore de­vel­op­ments and Guyana is poised to pro­duce over one mil­lion bar­rels of oil per day in the com­ing years as more projects come on­line.

Suri­name cur­rent­ly pro­duces less than 15,000 bar­rels per day, but has had suc­cess­ful dis­cov­er­ies off­shore. In late 2024, To­tal­En­er­gies took a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion on the mas­sive Gran­Morgu project in Block 58. Suri­name hopes to repli­cate the ex­pe­ri­ence of neigh­bour­ing Guyana.

While cen­tre of grav­i­ty of Caribbean hy­dro­car­bon pro­duc­tion has shift­ed south­east to Guyana and Suri­name, T&T still at­tracts sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est and cap­i­tal. T&T’s well-de­vel­oped gas in­dus­try of­fers an at­trac­tive and fast route to mon­e­tise any gas finds that can be linked in­to its ex­ten­sive in­fra­struc­ture.

The three south­ern Caribbean hy­dro­car­bon pro­duc­ers are all part of the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my. This means that, in the­o­ry, peo­ple, goods, ser­vices and cap­i­tal should be able to move freely be­tween the three coun­tries as if they were one sin­gle mar­ket.

In re­al­i­ty, there are still bar­ri­ers that need to be re­moved. If bar­ri­ers were re­moved, it would be eas­i­er to re­tain the crit­i­cal ser­vices, equip­ment and labour need­ed to ex­e­cute com­plex en­er­gy projects with­in the re­gion, re­ly­ing less on re­sources from out­side of the re­gion. This would help re­duce the cost of project ex­e­cu­tion and im­prove ef­fi­cien­cy. This is an ob­jec­tive that the En­er­gy Cham­ber re­mains com­mit­ted to achiev­ing.