The Keys to an Open Gate

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 The Keys to an Open Gate

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The EPA exempted Kurupung’s uranium drilling from an Environmental Impact Assessment on the grounds that radioactive waste would be “securely contained.” Its own applicant had already put in writing, two months earlier, that it wasn’t.
“…needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” — the applicant’s own consultant, March 2026. “…securely contained, monitored and managed.” — the EPA’s exemption notice, August 2026.

On September 11, Kaieteur News reported that the Environmental Protection Agency had cleared U92 Energy Corp.’s uranium exploration programme at Kurupung of the need for a full Environmental Impact Assessment. The notice, the agency said, followed a screening under Section 11(2) of the Environmental Protection Act. Among the reasons the EPA gave for its exemption: that fuel, waste, drill fluids, and uranium-bearing core and samples “will be securely contained, monitored and managed.”

That sentence is not a prediction anymore. It is a claim the agency’s own applicant had already contradicted in a document the agency itself appears to have relied on to make its decision.

THE DOCUMENT THE EPA HAD IN HAND

This publication has obtained the “Project Summary for Environmental Authorization” prepared for LIA (Guyana) Inc. — U92’s local subsidiary and the license holder of record — by Richard Spencer, PhD, P.Geo, C.Geol., the same qualified person credited in U92’s investor disclosures. It is dated March 2026. The EPA’s own September notice directs the public to a “Project Summary Tab” for further detail on the project it had just screened. This is, in all likelihood, that document.

In it, under a section titled “Drill Core Storage & Sampling Facility,” the company’s own geologist states that 88,000 metres of historic drill core — material from more than five decades of uranium exploration by four separate operators — sits on-site near the Aricheng airstrip. The core, the document says, “has been moved several times from the original, covered storage areas.” It “needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” A drone photograph in the same document labels one section of the site “Unsorted historic drill core.”

Convert 88,000 metres to miles and the figure comes out to just under 55 — matching, almost exactly, what the Amerindian Peoples Association told the EPA in its own letter weeks earlier: that 55 miles of radioactive core had been sitting, uncommunicated, near the community’s land and water.

The EPA’s Section 11(2) notice, published roughly six months after that document was written, does not mention this finding. It does not explain how a site the applicant’s own consultant describes as needing to be moved to “a safer, adequate facility” satisfies a determination that uranium-bearing material is being “securely contained.” It offers no indication that the agency ordered, or even requested, radiological testing of the existing storage site before reaching that conclusion.

AN EXEMPTION BUILT ON A CONTRADICTION

The EPA’s stated reasoning for exempting Kurupung from a full EIA rests on five points:

◊ That the project is exploration only.

◊ That land disturbance is small and localized.

◊ That impacts are temporary, reversible and manageable.

◊ That disturbed areas will be progressively rehabilitated.

◊ And that hazardous material will be securely contained under an approved Environmental Management Plan with radiation-safety conditions.

The fifth point is not a description of the current state of the site. It is a description of a future one — the same future one LIA Guyana’s own document sketches out in a section written entirely in the conditional and future tense: a new storage facility, east of the camp, not yet built; topsoil not yet cleared; gravel not yet compacted; a roof not yet erected. The EPA’s exemption notice treats “will be securely contained” as an adequate basis for clearing the project now. The applicant’s own paperwork treats it as a plan for later.

This is not a technicality. It is the difference between a regulator satisfying itself that a hazard is being managed, and a regulator accepting a company’s promise that it eventually will be — while approximately 88,000 metres of radioactive material sits, by the company’s own account, in a temporary and inadequate condition in the meantime, within a landscape the Amerindian Peoples Association says its people still walk, farm, hunt and draw water from.

Dr. Vincent Adams, the former EPA Executive Director whose credentials include chairing the International Atomic Energy Agency’s own 2009 conference on remediating radioactive land contamination, has already told this publication that Guyana has “no capacity whatsoever” to oversee uranium mining and its long-term monitoring — a judgment made before this document became public. Asked what such a country’s regulator should do when it does not have that capacity in-house, his answer was not equivocal: the possession of instruments, he said, means nothing without understanding what they show and how to respond to it.

An agency that cannot independently verify a radiological hazard has one honest option before granting any exemption: order the testing. Nothing in the EPA’s September notice indicates that happened.

WHAT “COMPETENT AUTHORITY” SHOULD HAVE MEANT HERE

EPA Executive Director Dr. Kemraj Parsram has told this publication’s colleagues at Kaieteur News that the agency is “the competent authority” that decides ‘if and when” an authorization is granted. That is the correct legal position. It is also the standard by which this decision now has to be judged.

A competent authority, confronted with its own applicant’s written admission that historic radioactive material has been repeatedly relocated, is not currently contained to modern standard, and remains in part unsorted, does not have the option of exempting the project and letting the containment plan catch up later.

It has the obligation to test the material, verify the risk, and make that verification — not the developer’s assurance — the basis of its decision. Anything less is not screening. It is trusting the fox’s floor plan for the henhouse.

The EPA’s own notice preserves an appeal window: any person who may be affected by the decision may lodge an appeal with the Environmental Assessment Board, addressed to its Chairman, within thirty days of publication. The Amerindian Peoples Association has already told the agency, in writing, that it was never consulted. Dr. Adams has already told the agency, in writing, that the state cannot safely oversee this material. Neither letter, on the public record, produced radiological testing of a hazard the applicant itself flagged as inadequately contained.

The appeal window is not a formality. It may be the only mechanism left standing between a written admission of risk and a drill program now cleared to proceed around it.

THIS PUBLICATION ASKS, DIRECTLY

Did the EPA review the March 2026 Project Summary — including its account of core that has been “moved several times” and “needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility” — before issuing its Section 11(2) exemption in August?

If it did, on what basis did the agency conclude that uranium-bearing material is being “securely contained” when its own applicant’s document says otherwise?

Did the EPA order, or request, independent radiological testing of the existing core storage site — including the area its own applicant’s drone imagery labels “unsorted historic drill core” — at any point before granting the exemption?

If no such testing occurred, will the EPA commit to ordering it now, before Phase One drilling proceeds and before the thirty-day appeal window closes?

This is not a question of whether Guyana should host a uranium industry. It is a question of whether the agency charged with protecting Guyanese land, water and people from one has read its own applicant’s paperwork.

Read the full details of the Project Summary submitted to the EPA.

Click the link  :Kurupung%20Project%20Summary.docx

 

— The Board

In Their Own Words

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 In Their Own Words

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar September 2026

The developer’s own consultant confirms it: 88,000 metres of historic uranium core — nearly the exact 55 miles the Amerindian Peoples Association reported — has been stored unsafely, moved repeatedly, and left partly unsorted at Kurupung
“…needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” — Project Summary for Environmental Authorization, prepared for LIA (Guyana) Inc., March 2026

For weeks, the Amerindian Peoples Association’s claim that 55 miles of radioactively contaminated core samples were sitting in storage at Kurupung, unreported and unexplained to the community that lives around it, stood as an allegation. A serious one, formally lodged with the Environmental Protection Agency — but an allegation nonetheless, made by a party the developer could, if it chose, dismiss as uninformed or exaggerating.

It can no longer make that choice. The company’s own retained geologist has confirmed the figure, and the condition, in a document prepared for LIA (Guyana) Inc. itself.

THE NUMBER, CONFIRMED

In a “Project Summary for Environmental Authorization” prepared for LIA (Guyana) Inc. by Richard Spencer, PhD, P.Geo, C.Geol. — the same qualified person credited in U92 Energy Corp.’s investor disclosures — the section titled “Drill Core Storage & Sampling Facility” states plainly: 88,000 metres of drill core from prior drilling on the project area is located on-site, near the Aricheng airstrip.

Convert that figure and it comes out to almost exactly 55 miles. It is not an approximate echo of what Indigenous leaders told the EPA. It is, within the rounding of a metric-to-imperial conversion, the same number.

This publication is not aware of any prior reporting that connected these two figures. The APA reported 55 miles from what its letter describes as community knowledge and concern. The company’s own consultant reported 88,000 metres from a site survey. Two sources, with no apparent coordination between them, describing the same pile of radioactive material in different units — and arriving at the same answer.

WHAT THE DEVELOPER’S OWN DOCUMENT SAYS ABOUT IT

The APA’s letter alleged that the community has never been told about this material, its condition, or the risk it poses. The company’s own document does not dispute that the material exists or that its handling has been inadequate. It says so itself.

The core, the document states, “has been moved several times from the original, covered storage areas.” It “needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” A drone photograph included in the document — labeled Figure 3-2 — shows what the caption calls a “Temporary drill core-sorting pad”: rows of stacked, tarp-covered material stretching across a cleared area near the airstrip. A separate section of the same image is labeled, in the company’s own annotation, “Unsorted historic drill core.”

Read that phrase again. This is not an activist’s characterization. It is the developer’s own retained professional geologist, in a document written for the developer’s own regulatory submission, stating that some portion of the radioactive material accumulated across five decades of exploration at Kurupung remains, as of March 2026, unsorted.

The same document goes on to describe a plan: a new storage site east of the exploration camp, cleared of topsoil, its gravel compacted, partially roofed in corrugated metal on steel pillars, with core boxes to be stacked on pallets and a dedicated, ventilated unit for a core saw. All of this is described in the future tense. It is a plan for what adequate storage should look like — written by the people who are, by their own account, not yet doing it.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE NUMBER

This publication’s prior reporting — “No Consent, No Rules” and “No Capacity, No Rules” — established two things: that Kurupung’s legal classification as “state land” allowed the government to bypass Free, Prior and Informed Consent obligations that would apply on titled Amerindian territory, and that Dr. Vincent Adams, the only Guyanese official ever to have chaired an international body on radioactive land remediation, considers the state to have no capacity whatsoever to oversee this project safely.

This document supplies what both of those arguments were missing: proof, not argument. It is one thing to say a country lacks the expertise to monitor uranium waste. It is another to have the developer’s own paperwork confirm that decades’ worth of it has, in fact, been mishandled — moved repeatedly, stored temporarily, left partly unsorted — in the immediate vicinity of a community that says it was never told.

The APA’s letter asked a direct question: who has been exposed, for how long, to material stored this way? That question does not go away because the company has now drafted a plan to fix it. A plan to build a safer facility is, definitionally, an admission that the current one is not safe. The company’s own document does not use the word “unsafe.” It does not need to. “Needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility” says the same thing in the language regulatory filings use when they are trying not to say it plainly.

THE QUESTIONS THIS DOCUMENT DEMANDS ANSWERS TO

This publication puts the following to LIA (Guyana) Inc., U92 Energy Corp., and the Environmental Protection Agency, on the record:

◊ When did the company first identify that historic core storage at Kurupung was inadequate, and when was the community notified of that finding — if it was notified at all, prior to the APA’s own letter surfacing the concern independently?

◊ What radiological monitoring, if any, has been conducted at the current temporary storage site and the “unsorted historic drill core” pile shown in Figure 3-2, and are those results available to the public or to the affected community?

◊ Given that the remedial storage facility described in the March 2026 document remains, by its own account, unbuilt, what interim safeguards — if any — are in place now, while thousands of tonnes of radioactive material sit in a “temporary” and admittedly inadequate condition?

◊ Does the EPA’s Environmental Management Plan, approved or under review for this project, include any binding requirement — with an enforceable timeline — to complete the remedial storage facility described in this document, or does it rely on the company’s own voluntary account of its intentions?

The APA has asked the EPA to rescind the environmental authorization already extended to this project. Dr. Adams has asked that his expertise be engaged before the state approves what it cannot yet monitor. This publication now asks a narrower, sharper question, one the developer’s own document makes unavoidable: if the company’s own geologist says the current arrangement is not adequate, on what basis has any part of this project been allowed to continue while it remains so?

— The Board

The State That Cannot Say No

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

The State That Cannot Say No

 EDITORIAL · INDIGENOUS RIGHTS & EXTRACTIVE GOVERNANCE

 BY : Hem Kumar –August 2026

At Tassawini, four days of blockade have exposed a legal architecture built to let mining outrun consent — and a government that keeps citing a ruling that never said what it claims.

For four days and nights, the residents of Chinese Landing have stood in the road at Tassawini, Region One, between excavators  and the land their community has held under absolute title since 1991. They are not there because the law is silent on their right to be consulted. They are there because the law has been read, again and again, in a way that makes their consent optional — and because the people responsible for closing that gap have spent a decade choosing not to.

Land Title, dated 24th April 1976, referenced on Plan #23703 Mining permit # 47798 with Annex 1 dated SEPT.25 1998.

This is not a new story, and that is precisely the point. Chinese Landing received communal title to its lands under the Amerindian Act in 1976, converted to an absolute grant in 1991. Between 1995 and 2001, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission issued a prospecting license and four Medium Scale Mining Permits inside those titled boundaries to a Georgetown businessman, Wayne Vieira, without the consent of the Village Council. A short-lived agreement in 1999 saw Vieira pay tribute to the council for roughly a decade; it collapsed in 2009 over a disputed rate increase, and the conflict that has defined Chinese Landing for a generation began in earnest.

A RULING THAT SETTLED NOTHING, CITED AS THOUGH IT SETTLED EVERYTHING

The government’s standing defense, repeated by Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat as recently as this month, is that its hands are tied by a 2017 ruling of the Caribbean Court of Justice. On August 5, at a community outreach in Tassawini, Bharrat told villagers that Vieira’s mining permit predated the village’s land title. Toshao Nikita Miller, present at that meeting, corrected him on the spot, on the record: title came in 1976; Vieira’s rights were purchased in 1995. The documentary record bears her out, and Bharrat’s own ministry’s history of the case says the same.

But the deeper misrepresentation is not about dates. It is about what the CCJ actually decided in Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission. In 2010, the GGMC issued Vieira a Cease Work Order for lacking a village agreement, as required under Section 48 of the Amerindian Act. Vieira challenged it, and won, all the way to the CCJ. But the Court’s ruling was narrow to the point of technicality: a mines officer’s power to issue a Cease Work Order, the Court held, can only be used to enforce breaches of the Mining Act itself — not the Amerindian Act, which is a separate statute the Minister of Natural Resources has no power to make regulations for. The Cease Work Order was quashed on that basis alone.

“The CCJ did not validate Vieira’s permits. It did not rule on whether the Village Council had standing to enforce its own consent rights. It found only that GGMC used the wrong legal instrument — and left the underlying question of who is right entirely open.”

The Court said as much itself, noting that the Amerindian Act already provides its own mechanism for resolving tribute disputes between miner and village — meaning that, in the CCJ’s own reasoning, no enforcement gap was created by its ruling. GGMC simply reached for a tool that belonged to a different statute. Two of the three legal questions the case raised — whether the Amerindian Act could apply retroactively to Vieira’s permits, and whether the Village Council had the standing to enforce its consent rights at all — were expressly left undecided as unnecessary to the outcome.

For the government to describe this judgment, as Minister Bharrat has, as a ruling made “in favor of Wayne Vieira” and his “rights to the mining concession” is not a defensible summary of the case.

It is a rhetorical upgrade of a jurisdictional technicality into a substantive vindication that the judgment itself declined to provide.

THE LOSS THAT WAS REAL, AND THE CONTRADICTION BENEATH IT

This is not to say Chinese Landing has never lost. In 2021, the Village Council brought its own claim against Vieira and GGMC, seeking to be heard directly after being shut out of the 2010–2017 proceedings entirely. The High Court dismissed it — and did so on the merits, holding that all minerals within Guyana vest in the state under Section 6 of the Mining Act, and that Vieira did not require the village’s permission to access the areas covered by his permits. That ruling, delivered by Chief Justice Ian Chang, is real, and any honest account of this dispute has to reckon with it rather than around it.

Map of Chinese Landing & Schedule of mining land

But reckoning with a ruling is not the same as accepting it as settled law, and there is good reason not to. In an earlier case, Daniel Dazell, Chief Justice Chang had ruled that a prospecting permit holder — even one granted before the Amerindian Act came into force — is required to observe Section 48 consent when the permit comes up for renewal after the Act’s commencement. In Vieira’s case, confronting substantially the same question, Chang ruled the opposite way, without stating any reason for the departure. The Court of Appeal upheld him with no written decision at all.

Eight years on, that contradiction has never been explained by any court, and the appeal against the 2021 ruling has sat before the Court of Appeal, unheard, for more than three years.

A state that vests minerals in itself is not, by that fact alone, a state entitled to ignore the consent provisions it wrote into its own Amerindian Act for exactly this kind of land. Mineral ownership and the right of entry to extract it are two different legal questions. Chinese Landing’s case has always turned on the second — and no court has yet resolved it consistently.

FOUR DAYS AT TASSAWINI

What has unfolded this week is what happens when that unresolved question meets machinery. According to the Village Council’s own account and independent reporting, at least nine excavators, two bulldozers and several dredge engines were moved onto Tassawini by barge without the operators notifying the Village Council. Residents blocked the equipment; one operator, after being called a “jackass” by residents accusing him of disrespect, had his machine switched off from the operator’s seat by a man and a woman who climbed aboard rather than let it pass. He turned around. The equipment operators say the machinery was brought in to repair roads. The village believes, not unreasonably given the volume of equipment involved, that this is cover for an expansion of mining activity the council has not approved.

The confrontation, per the council, began after a GGMC mines officer stationed at the site indicated he was either unable or unwilling to stop the equipment from entering Vieira’s blocks — meaning a state officer was present, and did not intervene. No representative of the Ministry of Natural Resources or the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs has made direct contact with the village since. Toshao Miller’s own account of the standoff’s third day captures the substance of what the state has offered instead: word, secondhand, that “talks” are underway between the Minister and GGMC, with nothing further communicated since.

Mining, according to the council, resumed at Tassawini in March. The village says it was not told the government had lifted its own mining ban until July — at the National Toshaos Council Conference, four months after the fact, and even then only in the form of vague references back to the CCJ ruling rather than a direct answer to a direct question.

A community whose consent the law requires learned, months after the fact, that the machinery it never consented to had already returned.

THE PATTERN BENEATH THE PRECEDENT

None of this is unique to Chinese Landing, and that is what should trouble anyone inclined to read it as an isolated land dispute rather than a structural feature of how Guyana governs its interior. In April 2024, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued its report on Isseneru, an Akawaio community in the Middle Mazaruni whose experience mirrors Chinese Landing’s in almost every particular: incomplete recognition of titled territory, mining permits issued without consultation or benefit-sharing, and — critically — a finding that Guyana’s Mining Act itself, not merely its enforcement, failed to incorporate the human-rights guarantees owed to Indigenous peoples. The Commission found that Isseneru’s own participation in mining did not waive its territorial rights or authorize the state to permit outside mining without consultation. The parallel to Chinese Landing’s Section 48 consent requirement, and to the state’s insistence that a mineral-vesting clause overrides it, is not subtle.

Nor is Chinese Landing’s experience of institutional avoidance unusual. The Inter-American Commission granted precautionary measures for the community in July 2023, citing threats, harassment and documented violence, including a 2018 incident in which a family was forced from its home under threat by a Tactical Services Unit officer and the mine’s general manager, and a 2021 incident in which a nineteen-year-old was allegedly slapped and pursued by mine security. Those measures required Guyana to establish a permanent, community-based monitoring mechanism, to conduct joint consultations with the village on protective measures, and to carry out comprehensive scientific environmental studies of the Barama River — steps this news outlet has found no evidence the government has taken.

What the government has done, instead, is write to the Commission asking that the measures be withdrawn, characterizing the original complaint as a misrepresentation.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEING ASKED

The Village Council has not asked for the impossible. It has asked that Vieira’s operations halt while mediation is completed and the community’s own case is finally heard — a modest request made considerably less modest by the fact that Vieira, per the council, has continued to prepare for and carry out mining activity while those very discussions are ongoing, which the council rightly characterizes as undermining the legitimacy of the process itself.                                          It has asked, too, that the Court of Appeal do what it has not done in more than three years: rule.

An abandoned mining pit with mining waste spilling over into the Barama river

The Barama River, meanwhile, does not wait on legal argument. Residents report that fish from the river now carry mercury, and that water once safe to drink is not. A medical team dispatched after Toshao Miller’s formal reports to the Regional Toshao Conference confirmed a link between the river’s turbidity and a local outbreak of diarrhea and vomiting.

This is the material cost of a legal architecture that has spent sixteen years failing to decide, cleanly and finally, whether a Village Council’s absolute title means what the word absolute suggests it should.

THE STANDARD THIS PUBLICATION APPLIES

This editorial draws a firm line between what the record supports and what remains contested, and that line matters here. The 2021 High Court ruling against Chinese Landing is real, stands as the current law pending appeal, and cannot be wished away by advocates on any side of this dispute. What this writer does dispute is the government’s characterization of the 2017 CCJ ruling as a merits victory for Vieira, when the judgment’s own text confines itself to a question of statutory authority and leaves the questions that matter to Chinese Landing undecided. That is not interpretation. It is what the ruling says.

A government that wished to close the legislative gap the CCJ identified in 2017 — the absence of any mechanism by which GGMC can enforce Amerindian Act consent requirements against a mining permit — has had eight years and a parliamentary majority to do so. It has not. A government that wished to give the Court of Appeal reason to move has had three years since the Village Council’s case was dismissed. It has not compelled that either. What it has done is stand up a mines officer at the very site of the dispute, watch him decline to intervene, and then refer the Toshao back to the same 2017 ruling that never answered her question in the first place.

The residents of Chinese Landing are not asking the state for something new. They are asking it to answer a question it has spent sixteen years avoiding.

Until it does, the road into Tassawini will continue to be guarded not by the law, but by the people the law was written to protect and has, so far, declined to

The Board 

This editorial draws on the full text of Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission [2017] CCJ 20 (A.J.); IACHR Resolution 41/2023 (Precautionary Measures No. 196-23); IACHR Report No. 8/24 (Isseneru v. Guyana); reporting by Kaieteur News, Stabroek News, Mongabay and the Department of Public Information; the Village Council’s public statements of August 21 and prior; and a direct video interview with Toshao Nikita Miller conducted during the standoff. The 2021 High Court judgment itself was not directly reviewed by this board; its holding is reported here as characterized consistently across three independent news sources and is presented as contested pending the outcome of the Village Council’s appeal.

NO ROYALTY, NO RULES

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

NO ROYALTY, NO RULES

The Kurupung Uranium Project and Guyana’s Regulatory Blind Spot

 Opinion By: The Board  ·  August, 2026

THE STATE NEGOTIATES WHAT IT HAS ALREADY GIVEN AWAY

Company filings on the Kurupung Uranium Project confirm what this news-media has long argued about Guyana’s extractive governance: the royalty owed to the Government of Guyana from any future uranium production has not been fixed. It will be “negotiated at the time that application is made for a mining permit” — a negotiation that can be deferred indefinitely, since applications may be filed “at any time during the term of a PL.”

Read plainly, this means the State of Guyana currently has no claim to any share of a resource historically estimated at 20.6 million pounds of uranium, sitting under 92.2 square kilometres of Region Seven, until the holder of the prospecting licence decides the moment is right to ask.

The contractor sets the clock. The regulator waits for it to ring.

We have written before about the opacity surrounding how exploration rights to Kurupung changed hands — from LIA Industries Pte. Ltd. of Singapore to U92 Energy Corp. of Canada — without the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) exercising any visible control over the transaction.

That finding stands. What follows extends it: the royalty vacuum is not an isolated omission. It is one symptom of a licensing framework that structurally cedes leverage to the licensee at every point where leverage should belong to the State.

PILLAR ONE: A ROYALTY WITH NO FLOOR

Guyana’s petroleum sector, for all its own well-documented deficiencies, at least operates within a negotiated framework anchored by precedent — the Stabroek Block production-sharing agreement, whatever its flaws, is a public, referenceable instrument.

Large-scale mineral mining under the Mining Act 1989 has no equivalent anchor. There is no statutory royalty rate for uranium. There is no benchmark percentage that GGMC or the Minister must not go below.

The rate is whatever is negotiated, whenever negotiation occurs, between the State and a single counterparty who has spent years — and by the time of application, potentially millions of dollars in drilling and evaluation — building the case for terms favourable to itself.

This is not a technicality. It means the government of Guyana’s return on a strategic, security-sensitive mineral is a function of negotiating leverage at a moment of the company’s choosing, not a matter of law.

 

PILLAR TWO: AN OFF-TAKE DEAL STRUCK WITHOUT THE REGULATOR IN THE ROOM

Before any royalty framework has been discussed, Gibraltar-based ROPA Investments Limited has already secured the contractual right to purchase up to 50 percent of the first 40 million pounds of uranium oxide produced from Kurupung — an option on 20 million pounds of production from a resource that has not yet cleared a mining permit, let alone entered production.

This news-media has previously established that ROPA and LIA Industries are related parties structured to present as arm’s-length counterparties in U92’s own acquisition filings.

GGMC was not a party to that transaction. It had no visibility into its terms and no opportunity to weigh how a privately negotiated off-take arrangement, agreed between related parties, might shape the economics of the very royalty the State will eventually sit down to negotiate.

A regulator that is absent from the deal that structures the resource cannot credibly claim to hold leverage over the value extracted from it.

PILLAR THREE: THE NATIONAL REPOSITORY THAT ISN’T REQUIRED TO RECEIVE THE DATA

GGMC describes itself, in its own institutional language, as the national repository for geoscientific data relating to Guyana’s mineral resources. The Mining Act 1989 does not build a mechanism equal to that mandate.

A prospecting licensee is obliged to submit work programmes and quarterly and annual operational reports. On relinquishment of licensed ground, the licensee must submit an evaluation report on the work undertaken. None of these obligations is the same undertaking as surrender of the underlying dataset — the drill logs, assay certificates, geophysical surveys, and resource modelling that constitute the actual commercial and scientific value of exploration.

The only point in the statute where “reports, analyses, and data resulting from investigations and studies” are explicitly required in full is at the application for a mining licence — the same discretionary juncture at which the royalty itself is negotiated.

Guyana’s only clear statutory mechanism for compelling both a royalty and a complete geological dataset from a uranium licensee is a single, optional filing that the licensee alone controls the timing of.

 

PILLAR FOUR: WHAT HAPPENS IF THE STATE SAYS NO

Consider the scenario a functioning regulatory framework should have already answered. GGMC and U92 sit down to negotiate a royalty rate. The company, having already sold forward an option on half its first 40 million pounds of production to a related party, has calculated its economics around a particular return threshold. GGMC, exercising the public interest it is charged to protect, holds out for a higher rate. Talks stall.

What then? The Mining Act offers no compulsory arbitration mechanism for this scenario, no statutory floor the Minister can fall back on, no default rate that applies absent agreement.

The Prospecting Licences run until 18th April 2027, extendable to 18th April 2029. The company can simply wait. It can let the clock run. If the licence lapses without a mining permit application ever being filed, the one statutory trigger that would have compelled surrender of the exploration dataset to the State never fires.

The company walks away — potentially still holding, through its corporate structure, a fully modelled uranium resource derived entirely from exploration conducted under a Guyanese state licence — while GGMC is left with quarterly activity reports and an evaluation summary.

No royalty. No enforceable claim to the data. No mining. And no accountability mechanism requiring anyone to explain why.

PILLAR FIVE: THE COMMUNITIES WHO WERE NEVER ASKED

None of the above accounts for the constituency this publication regards as the first and most fundamental stakeholder: the Indigenous and local communities of Region Seven. The Amerindian People’s Association has called for the Kurupung project to be halted outright, citing the total absence of public and community-level consultation before exploration rights were granted, transferred, and drilled against.

A regulatory framework that permits a foreign-held uranium resource to change corporate hands twice, secure a related-party off-take agreement, and commence a 5,000-metre drilling programme — all before Region Seven’s own residents have been meaningfully consulted — is not a framework failing at its edges. It is failing at its centre.

WHAT THIS NEWS-MEDIA DEMANDS

The pattern here is not new to readers of this news outlet’s ongoing accountability coverage: a regulator structurally absent from the transactions it is meant to police, a State whose return on a strategic mineral is deferred to a moment the extractor controls, and communities treated as an afterthought rather than a precondition. Kurupung differs only in the commodity — uranium is not gold, and the stakes of a genuinely opaque radioactive-minerals sector, in a country with no established uranium regulatory precedent, are of a different order entirely.

This publication calls on the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and the Minister responsible for Natural Resources to state publicly, and without further delay:

◊ Whether a minimum statutory royalty framework for large-scale uranium and radioactive-mineral production is under consideration, and if not, why not;

◊ What legal instrument, if any, compels U92 Energy Corp. or its subsidiaries to surrender full exploration data to GGMC in the event the Prospecting Licences lapse or are relinquished without a mining permit application;

◊ Whether GGMC was consulted on, or was even made aware of, the ROPA Investments off-take agreement prior to its execution; and

◊ What steps have been taken, or will be taken, to conduct genuine community-level consultation with the Indigenous residents of Region Seven before any further drilling proceeds.

The people of Guyana own these minerals. The law, as it stands, has not yet caught up to that fact.

— The Board

El Niño Is a Governance Test, Not Just a Weather Event

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA 

El Niño Is a Governance Test, Not Just a Weather Event

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

Guyana is entering a season that demands more than warnings about heat and dryness. The Hydrometeorological Service has already said the country should prepare for strengthening El Niño conditions, hotter-than-normal weather, fewer wet days, and as many as 80 hot spell days this year, with the greatest exposure in Regions 4, 5, 6, 8 and 10. 

The same advisory warns that reduced rainfall and higher temperatures are likely to stress crops, weaken pasture quality, raise livestock water needs, and increase the risk of water shortages.

El Niño is a Governance Test, not just a Weather Event That means this is not simply a climate bulletin. It is a food, income, and governance problem. If government response remains narrow, delayed, or rhetorical, then the burden will fall on citizens through higher prices, reduced production, and weaker household purchasing power.

 The public has a right to know whether the State is treating this as a serious national emergency or merely as another seasonal inconvenience. The evidence suggests that the risk is already visible. Hydromet has warned of drier conditions, prolonged dry spells, elevated temperatures, and short-term drought conditions in parts of Regions 8 and 9, with localized flooding still possible in low-lying areas. 

In other words, Guyana must prepare for both drought and flood stress at the same time.

 The Budget Must Now Be Tested

The government has repeatedly presented Budget 2026 as a major investment in food security and resilience. In January, the administration said agriculture would receive $113.2 billion, with $81.9 billion going to drainage and irrigation, $3.3 billion for other crops and technical support, and $745 million for agro-processing and storage-related support.  It also said agriculture and water spending was part of a broader effort to strengthen food security and drainage systems.

Those allocations are now under public scrutiny. A budget is not a talking point; it is a contract. If the country is now facing known El Niño risks, then citizens are entitled to ask whether the money was spent on genuine preparedness, and whether the promised infrastructure and support systems are operational.  

That question matters because the same government has claimed Guyana can fully feed its population and that agriculture is central to national resilience.  Such claims cannot be made while the country remains vulnerable to predictable climate shocks without a visible, funded, public response. Resilience is proved in action, not in slogans

What Authorities Must Explain

The Ministry of Agriculture must explain what specific El Niño measures were funded under Budget 2026, how much has been released, and where the projects are active. Farmers need to know whether there is drought-resistant seed distribution, irrigation support, technical extension, and region-by-region advisories. Hydromet has already made clear that crop stress and reduced pasture quality are expected outcomes, so the ministry cannot wait for losses to occur before reacting.

The Ministry of Finance must disclose what contingency planning exists for inflation, food-price spikes, and support to vulnerable households. If imports become more expensive because of global weather disruption, transport costs, or tighter regional supply, then the public should know what fiscal buffers are in place.

The absence of a public protection plan would amount to a policy failure, not a natural inevitability.  

The Ministry of Trade and Commerce must state how it will monitor food prices, prevent hoarding, and ensure that market behavior does not exploit scarcity. Citizens should not be left to discover that the price of basic food has risen only after the damage is already done.

Transparency on monitoring is as important as the monitoring itself.  

Hydromet, the Guyana Water Incorporated, the local government authorities, and the disaster-management system must also stop operating in silos. Hydromet has already described the likely impact on water resources, agriculture, heat stress, and wildfire risk.  That information must be converted into coordinated national action, not left as an isolated technical bulletin.

 What Citizens Should Watch

Citizens should insist on a public action plan that names the lead agencies, the budget lines, the geographic hotspots, and the trigger points for intervention. The plan should show what happens if rainfall falls below a threshold, if food prices spike, if water levels decline, or if crop stress becomes severe. Without trigger points, response becomes improvisation.  

They should also demand regular public updates, not occasional reassurance. The government should publish food-security information, price trends, farmer advisories, and water-risk updates in plain language. That is especially important because the most severe effects will not arrive all at once. They will accumulate quietly through rising costs, shrinking supply, and tighter household budgets.

This is also why local communities must be engaged early. Small farmers,hinterland residents, market vendors, household gardeners, school administrators, and public-health officials all need targeted guidance.

Heat stress, water scarcity, and transport disruption are not abstract risks; they are practical problems that will affect daily life.  

 The Failure That Must Be Avoided

The greatest danger is not only El Niño itself, but a familiar national habit: waiting for the crisis to become visible before treating it as urgent. That approach is costly, unnecessary, and unfair to the people who can least absorb the shock. If food prices rise, if water becomes harder to secure, or if farmers lose productivity, then citizens should be able to trace the failure back to specific offices that had both warning and budget.  

The public should not be told that all hardship is weather-related. Weather is the trigger; policy determines the depth of the damage. Guyana now has enough warning to act, enough money allocated to justify action, and enough institutional responsibility to be held accountable.

This is the moment for the authorities to prove that their promises mean something. The nation does not need more declarations of resilience. It needs a visible plan, disciplined execution, and honest public reporting so that families, farmers, and businesses can prepare together and weather the fallout with less pain.

THE VENDOR WAS NEVER ARM’S-LENGTH

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA                                   

THE VENDOR WAS NEVER ARM’S-LENGTH

What
By Staff -Writer.| The 592 Guardian | July 2026

When U92 Energy Corp. filed the paperwork describing its January 2026 acquisition of LIA Industries Pte. Ltd. — the Singapore holding company that controls Guyana’s only uranium project — it described the seller of the historical technical dataset that anchored the deal as an “arm’s-length vendor.” That phrase does real work in a corporate filing. It tells shareholders and regulators that the two sides of a transaction had no prior relationship, no shared ownership, no reason to trust one another’s numbers except the numbers themselves. It is the language of a clean transaction between strangers.
It does not appear to be true.

Following the footer
Gibraltar-based ROPA Investments Limited is the firm that, according to Kaieteur News’ reporting on the acquisition filing, secured off-take rights to 50% of the first 40 million pounds of uranium oxide produced at Kurupung — an option on up to 20 million pounds — plus a 2% net concentrate royalty over the prospecting licences that runs indefinitely, regardless of whether those licences are ever converted into a mining licence. That much was already public. What wasn’t yet connected in the coverage is who ROPA actually is, and what it already owned before the ink dried.

ROPA’s own website lists its uranium holdings under a section titled “Offtakes & Streams,” which includes a line item called “Lia energy fuels (Uranium).” That line links directly to lia.energy — the website of LIA Energy, whose homepage names five projects: Skull Creek, Kurupung, Firawa, Warmbad, and Virka. LIA Energy’s footer credits “ROPA INVESTMENTS” as its parent, and the site’s contact address routes through an @ropa.gi email domain — the same corporate family, not a separate counterparty.

Separately, ROPA’s own “Mining Verticals” page states plainly that since 2020, ROPA has owned and developed nearly 600 million pounds of global uranium assets, some of which have since been joint ventured, listed, or sold to other strategic parties.
Put together, this means the entity U92 described in its filing as an “arm’s-length vendor” of the Kurupung dataset was, in substance, ROPA’s own uranium platform — the same group that simultaneously walked away from the transaction holding a 50% off-take on first production and a perpetual 2% royalty.

LIA Industries wasn’t a disinterested seller cashing out of an asset. It was the vehicle through which ROPA built the position, before restructuring the ownership through a Canadian TSX Venture Exchange shell to give the project a public listing, a share price, and access to retail and institutional capital markets — while ROPA retained the economic upside on the ground in Guyana.
This is not necessarily improper under Canadian securities law — “arm’s length” is a defined term with its own tests, and it is possible for related parties to satisfy it depending on control thresholds and disclosure. But the pattern matters for a Guyanese readership for a different reason: it changes who was actually negotiating on the other side of the table when Guyana’s own regulatory involvement was limited to issuing an exploration licence.

GGMC’s role, precisely stated
To answer the direct question: nothing in the public record indicates GGMC had any role in structuring, reviewing, or approving the ROPA off-take agreement, the royalty, or the LIA/U92 share purchase. GGMC’s documented involvement begins and ends with the issuance of two Exclusive Prospecting Licences — GS14: L-1003/000/23 and GS14: L-1003/001/23 — to LIA (Guyana) Inc. on 19th April, 2024, granting exclusive rights of occupation and exploration for uranium, other radioactive minerals, and rare earth elements through 18th April, 2027, extendable to 2029.

Everything else — the 18th June, 2026 off-take agreement, the LIA/U92 share purchase, the dataset acquisition, the royalty buyback terms — occurred entirely at the level of corporate ownership, offshore, across Singapore, Ontario, and Gibraltar. GGMC licenses the ground.

It has no evident mechanism to review who owns the company holding the licence, what that company has promised third parties about future production, or whether the “vendor” in a related-party transaction is actually related. That is a structural gap in how Guyana’s minerals licensing regime interacts with international corporate finance — not a matter of any individual official’s judgment.

The filing is explicit that any royalty payable to the Government of Guyana will only be negotiated when a mining permit application is submitted — which can happen any time during the life of the prospecting licence. In practical terms: private, offshore claims on Kurupung’s output were locked in during 2025, ahead of Guyana’s own royalty ever being fixed. The state negotiates last, against a resource base a quarter of which — the first 40 million pounds — already carries a standing 50% claim from a single foreign investor.

Why this fits a pattern worth building on
Sharma Solomon of APNU raised the transparency question in June, calling for public disclosure and informed national debate on Kurupung. The government’s response, as far as the record shows, has been silence — consistent with the pattern this desk has already documented around GECOM commissioner appointments and the “no vacancy” stonewalling under Article 161(3)(b): oversight questions raised, met with executive non-response rather than engagement.

The uranium file adds a second, structurally different case to that thesis. It isn’t about a constitutional appointment being blocked. It’s about whether Guyana’s minerals-licensing framework has any visibility at all into beneficial ownership and related-party transactions layered on top of a prospecting licence — before a single ounce is mined, before the state’s own royalty is even negotiated. If GGMC’s mandate stops at the licence and does not extend upstream into who controls the licensee, that gap is available to be used again, on the next strategic mineral, by the next offshore platform.

Worth verifying next: GGMC’s file on beneficial ownership or change-of-control disclosure requirements attached to prospecting licences, if any exist; whether the Ministry of Natural Resources was informed of or consulted on the ROPA off-take prior to the filing becoming public; and whether GRA has visibility into transfer-pricing exposure on a future export stream that is already half spoken for by a related party.

The 592 Guardian will continue tracking the Kurupung file, including any government response to APNU’s disclosure request and further SEDAR+ filings from U92 as the drilling programme advances.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

The Green Mask Slips

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THE 592 GUARDIANEDITORIAL · INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS

The Green Mask Slips: Guyana’s 2026 Environmental Performance Index Score Exposes the Gap Between Biodiversity Branding and Climate Reality

While the Ali administration markets Guyana abroad as a biodiversity partner and low-carbon development model, Yale’s 2026 Environmental Performance Index ranks the country dead last of 177 nations on climate change mitigation — the single steepest ten-year decline in the entire index.
Guyana ranks 151st of 177 countries in the 2026 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), published by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy in partnership with Columbia University — a score of 30.32, nearly 12 points below the Latin America & Caribbean regional average of 42.07, and 30th of 31 countries in the region. The figure has circulated widely in recent days, framed as proof that Guyana now trails even Haiti in environmental standing. That comparison is true on its face. But it is also the least interesting fact in the dataset.

The real story is not the overall rank. It is what sits beneath it: a country that performs credibly on the metrics tied to its standing forest, and catastrophically on the metrics tied to its oil economy. Those two facts sitting side by side, in the same government’s official messaging, in the same fiscal year, are the actual scandal — and they are Yale’s numbers, not ours.

The Number the Government Won’t Be Citing

Buried inside Guyana’s aggregate score is a single category result that deserves to be the headline: Guyana ranks 177th of 177 countries — dead last, full stop — on Climate Change Mitigation, the policy objective that measures a country’s trajectory on greenhouse gas emissions. Guyana’s score in that category is 3.67. Its ten-year change is -20.77, the steepest decline recorded for any country in the 2026 index — worse than Mongolia, worse than Laos, worse than any of the traditional laggards this ranking usually surfaces.
A related indicator, greenhouse gas emissions trend adjusted per capita, tells the same story from a different angle: Guyana scores 0.0, tied for the worst rank in the world (171st of 177), with a ten-year swing of -18.25. This is not a measure of how much a country emits in absolute terms — small, low-population states are structurally protected from that comparison. It is a measure of trajectory: whether a country’s per-capita emissions, adjusted for economic growth, are rising or falling. Guyana’s are rising faster, relative to its own growth, than almost anywhere else measured.

Forests: 36th of 177. Climate Change Mitigation: 177th of 177. Same country, same year, same government.

That divergence is the anomaly this report should be built around — not Guyana-versus-Haiti, but Guyana-versus-Guyana. On Forests, the country ranks a respectable 36th of 177, a score of 30.42 that reflects the genuinely low deforestation rate and the intact landscape integrity that has anchored every LCDS and carbon-credit pitch this government has made since 2009. The rainforest claim is not manufactured.

What is manufactured is the impression, cultivated in international forums and glossy biodiversity-partnership announcements, that this forest performance describes the country’s environmental trajectory as a whole. It does not. It describes one category out of twelve — and it is being used to paper over the worst-performing category in the entire index.

Reading the Category Breakdown

The table below sets out where Guyana’s 2026 EPI performance actually sits, category by category, against the field of 177 countries scored under this edition’s methodology (47 indicators across 12 issue categories, spanning three policy objectives: Environmental Health, Ecosystem Vitality, and Climate Change).

Category Guyana Rank Score 10-Yr Change
Overall EPI 151 / 177 30.32 -4.13
Climate Change Mitigation 177 / 177 3.67 -20.77
GHG Emissions Trend (per capita, adj. 171 / 177 0.0 -18.25
Forests 36 / 177 30.42 n/a

Source: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy / Columbia University, 2026 Environmental Performance Index, epi.yale.edu. Regional average (Latin America & Caribbean): 42.07.

The pattern is unambiguous. Guyana’s ecosystem assets — the forest it did not build, only declined to destroy — are propping up an aggregate score that would otherwise sit even lower. Strip Forests out of the picture and weigh Guyana purely on the categories shaped by government policy choice — energy procurement, emissions trajectory, industrial permitting — and the picture is one of the worst-performing petrostates measured anywhere in the 177-country field.

The Con: Selling Biodiversity While Failing Climate

This publication has tracked, across the Wales Gas-to-Energy project, the Karpowership rate escalation from 7.06¢ to 9.5¢ per kWh, and the broader energy dependency thread, a pattern of procurement decisions that entrench fossil generation rather than displace it.

The 2026 EPI’s Climate Change Mitigation collapse is the statistical signature of exactly that pattern.

A country cannot credibly market itself as a biodiversity and low-carbon partner to sovereign wealth funds and COP delegations while its own emissions trajectory — independently measured, methodologically transparent, published by one of the most cited environmental research institutions in the world — is rated the single worst of any nation on earth.

The Long Creek estate controversy, the Former Presidents Benefits Bill, and the GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract are, on their face, governance stories about land, money, and procurement law. The EPI data gives them an environmental dimension that has been largely absent from the public conversation: every one of those threads sits downstream of the same executive posture — extraction and consumption decisions made with minimal independent oversight, dressed in the language of climate leadership abroad.

What This Is Not

Fairness requires two caveats, both of which strengthen rather than weaken the case.    First, Yale’s own FAQ states plainly that EPI scores should not be compared across editions as a time series, because methodology and indicator counts change with each release — the 2026 edition uses 47 indicators across 12 categories and 177 countries, versus 58 indicators, 11 categories, and 180 countries in 2024. Any claim that Guyana has “fallen” some number of places since the last edition is not supportable from this data and should not appear in this publication’s coverage. The story is not a decline narrative. It is a snapshot — and the snapshot alone is damning enough.
Second, the Forests and land-use performance is real and should be stated as such without qualification. The case here is not that Guyana’s environmental record is uniformly poor. It is that the government’s public messaging leans entirely on the one category where performance is strong, while remaining silent on the category — climate mitigation — where performance is, by Yale’s own numbers, the worst measured anywhere in the world.

The Accountability Question

Every biodiversity partnership announcement, every ART TREES carbon-credit sale, every appearance at an international climate forum trades on the credibility of Guyana’s forest numbers. None of that messaging, to date, has had to answer for the 177th-place climate mitigation score sitting in the same index. That is the question this newsroom will be putting to the relevant ministries: how does a government reconcile marketing itself as a global biodiversity and climate partner while its own independently measured emissions trajectory is rated worst in class among 177 nations?

Guyanese taxpayers, and the international partners being asked to fund and endorse these biodiversity arrangements, deserve an answer grounded in the same data the government cites when the numbers run in its favour.
THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM. GUYANA

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Independent Accountability Journalism  ·  Guyana

EDITORIAL

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part IV of IV  ·  Pollute As Much As You Want

Pollute As Much As You Want, Provided You Can Pay For It

Guyana was promised zero flaring at the Stabroek Block. Instead, ExxonMobil has burned off more than a billion cubic feet of gas into the Atlantic sky, paid a fraction of what independent analysts say the pollution is worth, and won in court when Guyanese citizens tried to force a stricter permit. This is the enforcement gap at the heart of Guyana’s oil era — and the final installment of this series.

Parts I through III of this series traced the arithmetic of the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), the stability clause that froze that arithmetic beyond Parliament’s reach, and the decommissioning liability Guyana is quietly pre-funding with no guarantee the money will still exist when it is needed. Part IV closes the series by asking a simpler question: when the Contractor breaks its own environmental promises, what actually happens?

The answer, on the public record, is: not very much

The Promise: Zero Flaring

When the Government of Guyana approved the environmental permit for the Liza Phase 1 project, it did so on the strength of a specific commitment. ExxonMobil’s own environmental impact assessment represented that the project could achieve zero non-routine gas flaring — that associated gas produced alongside crude oil would be captured and reinjected into the wells rather than burned off into the atmosphere. The Minister of Natural Resources at the time stated unequivocally that under no circumstances would there be flaring of the gas.

“That promise did not survive first production. Faulty compression equipment aboard the Liza Destiny FPSO caused ExxonMobil to begin flaring within weeks of the field coming online in December 2019, and it has continued in one form or another ever since.”

What the Satellite Data Shows

Independent verification, rather than company self-reporting, has driven most of what the public knows about the scale of the problem. Satellite monitoring compiled through the Every Last Drop project using SkyTruth data, cross-referenced with figures from the environmental rights organization Arayara Institute, documented 1,298 separate flaring events at the Stabroek Block between 2019 and 2023 alone, releasing an estimated à 1.32 million tons of CO2 — comparable to the annual emissions of roughly 287,000 cars. The analysis found the block’s flaring had made Guyana the second-largest gas-flaring emitter in the entire Amazon basin, trailing only Ecuador.

By July 2021, the Government’s own figures put cumulative flared gas at more than 15.1 billion cubic feet. That volume represents energy roughly equivalent to Guyana’s entire national electricity consumption for a year, burned into the sky rather than captured.

The Permit Was Weakened, Not Enforced

The regulatory response to this pattern was not tightening. It was loosening. In April 2021, environmental activists including Sherlina Nageer, using satellite evidence they had gathered independently, formally alerted the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the scale of ongoing flaring. Within a month of that complaint, the EPA revised ExxonMobil’s environmental permit — not to strengthen the zero-flaring requirement, but to extend the allowable flaring period from three consecutive days to sixty.

– The Permit Modification (as reported by multiple independent outlets)

 

Following a 2021 activist complaint documenting extensive non-routine flaring, the EPA revised EEPGL’s environmental permit to extend the allowable continuous flaring window from three days to sixty days, without conducting a fresh Environmental Impact Assessment.

Citizens challenged the legality of that modification in court, arguing that a permit change of this magnitude, made without a new environmental impact review, was unlawful. In 2023, Chief Justice Roxanne George ruled in ExxonMobil’s favour, finding that it had not been proven the modified permit was causing additional adverse environmental effects, and that nothing in Guyanese law prevented the issuance of a modified permit on those terms.

“The government is basically saying: pollute as much as you want, provided you can pay for it.”

That assessment came from Dr. Vincent Adams, the former Head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and a thirty-year veteran of the US Department of Energy, responding to the court’s ruling. Dr. Adams has been a recurring, credible critic of the regulatory posture Guyana’s institutions have taken toward ExxonMobil throughout this series’ reporting, and his assessment of the flaring permit fits the broader pattern: technically lawful concessions, made in response to the Contractor’s operational failures, that leave the public paying the environmental cost while the Contractor pays a fee calibrated well below the damage.

The Fines Do Not Match the Harm

Guyana calculates flaring penalties under the Polluter Pays Principle set out in its 1996 Environmental Protection Act. The rate has increased over time — from US$30 per tonne of CO2-equivalent under the original permit, to US$45, and now to US$50 under the renewed five-year Liza 1 permit issued in 2025. By late 2021, the EPA confirmed it had collected approximately G$930 million, or roughly US$4.5 million, in cumulative flaring payments from ExxonMobil.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that figure hard to square with the scale of the pollution. Using a benchmark rate of US$75 per tonne — a level IEEFA characterized as more realistic — the organization calculated ExxonMobil should have paid closer to US$26 million for the flaring recorded through mid-2021: roughly six times what it had actually paid. ExxonMobil separately paid an US$8.4 million penalty in 2022, a sum that registers as a rounding error against a company that recorded tens of billions of dollars in global annual profit in the same period.

For comparison, when ExxonMobil flared gas on American soil, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice fined the company US$2.5 million in 2017 and required a further US$300 million outlay for pollution-control technology at its domestic facilities. Guyana’s cumulative flaring collections, spread across years and multiple incidents, remain a fraction of what US regulators extracted for a single enforcement action.

A Pattern Consistent With the Rest of the Series

Read against Parts I through III, the flaring record is not an isolated environmental footnote. It is the same structural imbalance this series has documented in the fiscal terms, the stability clause, and the decommissioning liability, now visible in environmental enforcement:

A Contractor whose commitments were not met, a regulator whose response was to relax the rule rather than enforce it, a judiciary that found the relaxation lawful, and a public that bears the atmospheric and reputational cost while the financial penalty remains, by independent estimate, a fraction of the damage.

The scale of what is now at stake is only growing. Stabroek Block output surpassed 918,000 barrels per day in February 2026, with the consortium targeting 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030 and ExxonMobil now seeking environmental authorization for a further 35-well exploration campaign running through 2033. Guyana’s environmental regulator has, for the first time, requested a cumulative impact study covering that new campaign alongside all other offshore activity — a modest but real acknowledgment that project-by-project review has not been sufficient. Whether that acknowledgment translates into enforcement, rather than another accommodation, is the question this series leaves the public, and the Government, to answer.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

In concluding this series, we are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Department of Energy:

  1. What is the current cumulative total, in both Guyana dollars and US dollars, that ExxonMobil and its partners have paid in flaring penalties since December 2019, broken down by year and incident?
  2. What analysis, if any, did the EPA conduct before extending the permitted continuous flaring window from three days to sixty days in 2021, and will that analysis be published?
  3. Does the Government consider the current US$50-per-tonne flaring penalty rate to reflect the actual environmental and climate cost of the emissions, and if not, what rate would it consider adequate?
  4. In light of the cumulative impact study now being requested for the proposed 35-well exploration campaign, will the EPA apply the same cumulative standard retroactively to the flaring record of the currently producing FPSOs?

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial.

This concludes The Stabroek Surrender. Across four parts, this series has examined the fiscal terms, the stability clause that locked them in place, the decommissioning liability Guyana is pre-funding without safeguard, and the flaring record that has outpaced enforcement. ,The throughline is consistent: a Government that entered a defining national contract from a position of weakness, and has since treated every mechanism for correcting that weakness — renegotiation, arbitration exposure, financial safeguards, environmental enforcement — as a fixed cost of doing business rather than a lever available to a sovereign state. The 592Guardian will continue reporting on the audit void and the question of government complicity in a future series.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

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“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

OP-ED BY DR.VINCENT ADAMS

Laboratory analysis confirms contaminant concentrations in local water supplies at 630 times the safe regulatory limit, a finding that public health experts say makes Guyana Water Inc.’s recent statement appear irresponsible and dangerously dismissive.

Upon reading the July 5, 2026 edition of THE 592 GUARDIAN summarizing the Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC) 2025 findings on drinking water quality in Regions 4, 7 and 10, I was embarrassed and astounded by the Guyana Water Inc’s (GWI) statement reported in the July 3, 2026 Kaieteur News article that “Water quality issues flagged by PUC affect only taste, colour and appearance, not safety”.

True to the Govt’s code of conduct, GWI attempts to deceive the people, not only by leaving out the actual measurements that would make it impossible to back up their ludicrous claim, but also insultingly tells the people not to believe the coffee coloured water they see with their own eyes. This GWI statement is nothing but irresponsible, callous and dangerous to the people’s health.

This issue is close to home for yours truly, since I happen to be one of the 11 Engineers specially trained by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to establish and run the GWI (originally GUYWA) initiated in 1972; so, knows first-hand of the world class Water Authority handed over to the PPPC Govt in 1992, only to see it descend to this abbys of incompetence and neglect of its sacred mandate to provide reliable, clean and safe water to the public. Instead, the people are heartlessly advised that it is no big deal for them to drink water that is perilous to their health, while certainly not the same water consumed by Govt officials and their families.

In a normal country, it would have been an oxymoron for a country to be dubbed “the land of many waters” with “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink” (Poet Samuel Coleridge).

The data analyses and facts – Human beings can survive without oil, electricity, etc., but never without water! A safe water supply is guided by scientifically developed safe standards and undoubtedly the most essential substance for the sustenance of human life. Consequently, let’s address the three contaminants highlighted by the PUC that falls out of the range of safe standards. They are: pH, turbidity and iron.

pH – The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14 with lower pH values corresponding to higher acidity. However, it is most important to note that the pH scale is logarithmic and not linear, meaning each unit change represents a 10-fold change in acidity. For example, a pH of 4 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 5, and 100 times more acidic than a pH of 6. This means that the 3.7 pH measured at Linden is 630 times more acidic than the World Health Organization (WHO) safe pH limit of 6.5.

Highly acidic water at 630 times the safe limit is corrosive and can dissolve toxic heavy metals such the copper and lead from the plumbing lines, which wind up in your drinking water. Ingesting these metals can cause serious health problems such as cancer, stroke, kidney disease, memory loss, high blood pressure, reduced bone density, etc. It is more toxic for children, as their growing bodies absorb these metals much quicker. Further, water with a high acidity has likely not gone through proper filtration and may still contain pollutants like pesticides and chemicals making the water unsafe to drink.

Turbidity – As clearly defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “Turbidity is a measure of the cloudiness of water, and the higher the levels the more particles (which carry the pollutants) are present. It is used to indicate water quality and filtration effectiveness (such as whether disease-causing organisms are present) and higher levels are associated with higher levels of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria.”

Notwithstanding that one doesn’t need a measurement to verify the obvious that coffee coloured water at Grove means extremely high turbidity, the actual measurement of 29 times the US EPA and WHO limits plainly points out the grave health risk of consuming such water that may indicate presence of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria. Substantively, owing to constant flooding, flood water with disease-causing microorganisms from latrines, septic tanks, manholes and pipes transporting raw city sewage, will most likely leak into the drinking water pipe network; thus, testing for the presence of these microorganisms must be conducted, especially during and after floods.

Iron – Though at a high level of 3.35 mg/l, or 11 times the WHO guideline, high iron content is not a major health concern, and high levels are expected from the upper of the two major aquifers supplying Georgetown and the East Coast of Demerara. However, high iron levels may create operational and cosmetic problems, staining plumbing fixtures, sinks, dishes, and laundry with a rust color; and can build up inside pipes, reducing water flow and clogging appliances like dishwashers and water heaters.

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

I hope this missive will implore the GWI to immediately do the right and responsible thing to apologetically retract their advice to consume such unsafe water, and to follow-up with urgent actions to satisfy its only mandate to provide the nation with mankind’s most precious substance and basic need for a safe water supply, especially in a nation with the highest GDP.

In the meantime, I humbly wish to dissuade the public from following GWI’s inexplicably advice that the water is safe, despite its irrefutable scientific indications of being hazardous to human health.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive Seasons

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ FOR GUYANA

Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive Seasons

As a Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive seasons in recent memory, a provocative scientific paper asks a difficult question: if we can’t stop the planet from warming fast enough, should we consider temporarily dimming the sun to blunt the worst impacts?

A team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography used climate models — and lessons from the 2019–20 Australian “Black Summer” fires — to test whether marine cloud brightening, a form of solar geoengineering, could tamp down a powerful El Niño. The idea is simple in concept and fiendishly complex in execution: spray sea-salt aerosols into low ocean clouds so they reflect more sunlight, cool the tropical Pacific, and reduce the spike in global temperatures that a Super El Niño would bring.

Their models show it might work — at least partially. Targeted cloud brightening applied early could shave roughly 40 percent off peak El Niño warming in the simulations. That could translate into fewer heatwaves, smaller wildfires, reduced crop failures, and less pressure on overstretched health and emergency systems. For regions like the Caribbean and Guyana, where livelihoods depend on stable rainy seasons, fisheries and agriculture, and where disasters quickly overwhelm limited response capacity, any tool that lowers immediate harm is tempting.

But temptation is not policy. The paper is a proof of concept, not a policy prescription — and for good reason. The gulf between a model result and a safe, effective technology is vast. Engineers currently lack sprayers capable of delivering the right quantity and size of particles over the required ocean areas. Models still struggle to predict the cascading, remote effects of changing cloud reflectivity on global rainfall patterns. And there is real risk of overcorrection: a “too strong” intervention could trigger a mega La Niña with its own catalogue of floods, storms and agricultural disruption.

Beyond technical uncertainty lie profound ethical and geopolitical questions. Who decides to dim the sun for months or years? A handful of wealthy states, private funders, or an international process that includes the most vulnerable voices? The distributional stakes are enormous: a change that reduces heat in one place might reduce rain in another, hitting small island states, farmers, or urban poor who already carry the heaviest climate burdens. Then there’s the moral hazard: the more credible a techno-fix becomes, the more it risks blunting the political urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the only durable solution to the climate crisis.

So what should policymakers, civil society and the public in the Caribbean and Guyana take from this study? First: don’t be distracted. Geoengineering research must be watched, regulated and debated transparently, but it is not a substitute for rapid emissions cuts or for costly, necessary adaptation. Second: demand a voice. Any international discussion of geoengineering governance must include the countries most at risk. We cannot allow decisions about global sunlight to be taken behind closed doors by institutions or corporations with little stake in our futures. Third: invest in readiness. Whether or not marine cloud brightening ever becomes viable, this decade will bring some of the highest-stakes weather in living memory. Strengthening water management, resilient agriculture, early-warning systems and health infrastructure is non-negotiable.

Finally, treat this science as what it is: an alarm bell. The study underlines a brutal truth — climate change is not a gradual nuisance; it is pushing natural systems like El Niño into new, more dangerous regimes. If a high-tech intervention is even being discussed as a possible emergency tool, that is evidence of failure, not ingenuity. Our response should be proportionate: accelerate deep emissions cuts, fund adaptation where lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, and build inclusive, binding governance for any research into planetary-scale interventions.

We cannot let the lure of a quick technical fix derail our political will. The choice before us is stark: commit to the long, difficult work of decarbonisation and resilience now, or gamble with untested manipulations of the very system that sustains life on Earth.

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD, JULY 2026