Suriname, Guyana and Brazil are now attracting more new investment than the Gulf of Mexico and other more established oil fields. And they are helping to keep global oil prices relatively low, undermining the efforts of Russia and its allies in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to manage global supply and push up prices.
In Guyana, according to IHS Markit, the energy consulting firm, oil companies have found more than 10 billion barrels of probable reserves of accessible oil and gas abroad. Production began in 2019 and is rapidly pushing up. According to consultants, Guyana is already responsible for one of the top 50 oil basins worldwide.
Suriname has at least three to four billion barrels of reserves, energy experts said, or up to half of the new oil and gas discovered around the world last year.
But exploiting the reserves in a way that benefits its people could be a challenge for Suriname, a former Dutch colony that has been politically unstable for the past forty years and ruled by Desire Bouterse, a former army sergeant who in a coup took power. . In 1999, a court in the Netherlands sentenced Mr. Bouterse convicted of drug trafficking. In 2019, a court in Suriname found him guilty of the murders of 15 political opponents in 1982 and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. He lost an election and retired last year but was not sent to jail.
The new president, Chan Santokhi, a former police chief and justice minister, faces many challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic and a fiscal crisis. The unemployment rate was 11.2 percent last year, and inflation is extraordinarily high; the IMF expects consumer prices to rise by almost 50 percent this year.
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Exploration of oil and natural gas could easily get the country of about 600,000 people, about Milwaukee’s population, out of poverty if Mr. Santokhi’s government is taking the right step. But history is replete with examples of countries that have not been able to properly manage energy and mineral wealth, a phenomenon that economists call the ‘resource curse’.