The oil industry is clear when asked where the new flow of crude will come from. Given the production cuts by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the cap that the United States and Canada are reaching, new oil will depend largely on two small countries that do not even represent the population of the Region of Murcia. Expectations placed on crude oil from neighboring Suriname and Guyana united, they barely reach 1.4 million inhabitantshave become the hope of the oil industry and the consuming countries. It is true that the future production of these two countries will not “save the world”, but it represents a before and after for the industry because of the ease with which this new torrent of crude oil is produced and its low cost. costs. With will, financial strength and technology, a large quantity of oil can be produced relatively quickly.
The analysis company Global data conducted a survey this summer to assess which oil fields and regions offer the best short- and medium-term prospects. About 33% of respondents consider that the emerging oil areas of Guyana-Suriname They could be the main growth engine of the oil industry. The Guyana-Suriname Basin (a sedimentary basin from which Guyana, Brazil and soon Suriname “drink”) attracted attention after ExxonMobil announced large quantities of oil in the Liza-1 block off Guyana in 2015.
Since then, This “piece” of water and its surroundings have become the epicenter of new oil production. Everyone wants to emulate Guyana, this small country that went from no crude oil production to more than 600,000 barrels per day. However, the latest projections already indicate that its peak oil production (the maximum it will be able to produce) will be 1.5 million barrels, an astonishing amount. Never before has a country with such a small population produced so much crude oil.
The merit of Guyana’s oil
While Suriname and Brazil will “eat a piece of the pie,” Guyana is undoubtedly the star. Not only was it the first country (with the help of ExxonMobil) to successfully exploit crude oil in this region, but its growth has been meteoric, going from no oil production to extracting over 600,000 barrels of crude oil each year. Even the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released a memo explaining how Guyana will not be a major player in global oil this year and in 2025.
Despite this late start, production has grown extremely rapidly. Normally, when it comes to oil projects, delays and disappointments are common. The opposite has happened with Guyana. This, in turn, has boosted the country’s economy, almost at the same rate as crude oil production, and has enabled double-digit annual GDP growth rates that will continue through 2028, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Guyana’s GDP grew by about 38% in 2023 and is expected to grow by more than 30% in 2024. With this data, it seems logical that Guyana has become the example for neighboring countries to follow.
Today, Brazil and Suriname are looking for their own “miracle” in the same sedimentary basin. Suriname’s crude oil production is expected to increase 20-fold in the coming years up to 200,000 barrels of crude oil per dayIn the coming years, Guyana and Suriname could together produce nearly 2 million barrels per day, an amount that would almost double their populations, making them the region with the highest oil production per capita in the world.
Equatorial Margin Oil
The three countries share the same sedimentary basin, off the coasts of Guyana, Suriname and northern Brazil, known as the equatorial margin and considered by Experts see oil as ‘next frontier’ (This is one of the few areas where there is still much to explore and where there is certainty about the existence of significant oil accumulations.) These three countries share many elements and processes of the same petroleum system.
The deep water oil of Guyana and Suriname belongs to the same sedimentary basin, with a similar petroleum system, which can extend into several of the deep water sub-basins of the equatorial margin of Brazil: Foz do Amazonas, Pará-Maranhao, Barreirinhas, Ceará and Potiguar, explains Jorge Navarro, vice president of AGGEP (Association of Spanish Petroleum Geologists and Geophysicists), in statements to elEconomista.es.
More than 40 oil fields have been discovered so far and are expected to contribute significantly to the country’s future production. The basin contains between 6,300 and 13,000 million barrels of recoverable crude oil and condensate reserves, according to various sources. By 2024, ExxonMobil produced 514,000 barrels of crude oil per day in the Guyana-Suriname Basin.
Africa’s Oil
On the other hand, industry experts, with 22% of the votes, believe that African countries that are beginning to develop their oil resources will also be very important for the future of oil. These countries are Namibia, Senegal, Mauritania, Uganda and Tanzania, which have one of the best prospects for production growth in the coming years. In Namibia, it is estimated that there could be up to 11 billion recoverable barrels, in Uganda about 2.5 billion, in Senegal about 1 billion (in the best case) and the rest of the countries still do not know for sure how much oil there could be. be.
This “rain” of oil reserves is important for the market, but it is not a “game changer” or a revolutionary change. It must be taken into account that the world consumes about 100 million barrels of crude oil every day, so these billions of barrels are just a few additional crumbs for the current demand. Countries with significant reserves have more than 100 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil. In some cases (Saudi Arabia and Venezuela), they exceed up to 200 billion barrels.
