Zero Dollars, One Hundred Lives: The Price of Guyana’s Deference to Exxon

Zero Dollars, One Hundred Lives: The Price of Guyana’s Deference to Exxon

BOARD EDITORIAL

By: Editor

Exxon made roughly US$160 million in profit per day in the second quarter of 2026 — US$14.5 billion over three months, its highest quarterly haul since the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. Chevron and Shell posted comparable windfalls over the same period, all driven by the price spike that followed the outbreak of the US-Iran war. None of that profit was earned in Guyanese waters. But a meaningful share of the conditions that produced it were: the Stabroek Block is now one of the most productive and lowest-cost oil provinces on earth, and Guyana’s 2016 Production Sharing Agreement is the instrument that decides how much of that windfall the country that owns the resource actually keeps.

The answer, this news-media has now modelled directly against the government’s own published figures, is: far less than the government’s own most aggressive supporters could defend if forced to show their work.

THE ZERO-DOLLAR TAXPAYER

Under the 2016 PSA, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC do not pay corporate income tax to the Guyana Revenue Authority out of pocket. Instead, Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund pays the companies’ tax liability on their behalf, out of the government’s own share of profit oil — and the GRA then issues the companies a Certificate of Tax stating the liability was met.

Chartered accountant Christopher Ram has pursued this point publicly and specifically, at one stage challenging Attorney General Anil Nandlall directly to produce the actual schedule of certificates issued to the consortium.

This news  is not aware of that schedule ever having been produced. Until it is, the public claim that Exxon “pays taxes” in Guyana rests on paperwork the state itself generates and the state itself funds — not on money the company forfeits from its own earnings.

Ram has not minced words about what this arrangement amounts to in practice: while other governments move toward taxing the same oil-price windfall, he has written, “Guyana’s leaders have ruled this out,” and ExxonMobil and its partners are “not paying one dime in taxes on its profits.”

THE REFUSAL, ON THE RECORD

This is not a one-off oversight. President Irfaan Ali was asked directly about windfall oil revenue in an interview with Rice University’s Baker Institute earlier this year — with an Exxon representative present in the room. His answer: “windfall I would not go so far because you have to balance this off.” He then moved on to artificial intelligence, drones, and hotel development before returning, unprompted, to Exxon’s own cost-recovery position and Guyana’s future as an oil producer “beyond 2060.”

Ram’s own proposals, laid out most recently in April 2026 as international pressure over war-driven oil prices intensified, are neither radical nor unfamiliar to any functioning petroleum jurisdiction: that the oil companies “bear their own corporation tax liabilities,” pay withholding tax on profits, and that a “modest mechanism” allow the state to participate more fully during periods of exceptional prices.

Every element of that ask has been available to this government since at least early 2025. None of it has moved.

WHAT THE NUMBER ACTUALLY IS

Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund recorded US$1.996 billion in deposits for the first six months of 2026 — US$1.779 billion from the government’s share of profit oil, the balance from royalties. Independent analysis of the Stabroek Block’s output puts total block revenue for the same six months at approximately US$12.3 billion. That works out to Guyana retaining roughly 16 percent of total revenue generated from its own resource — consistent with ExxonMobil Country Manager Alistair Routledge’s own public figure of “roughly 14 and a half percent.”

Modelling a windfall tax — not a renegotiation of the royalty or profit-share structure, simply an additional levy of 10 percent on total Stabroek Block revenue, the same modest mechanism Ram has proposed — against that six-month revenue figure produces approximately US$1.23 billion. Guyana’s entire 2026 national budget allocation for roads and bridges, announced with fanfare in January, is GY$196.1 billion — approximately US$938 million.

A single ten percent windfall levy on six months of oil revenue from one offshore block exceeds the entirety of what the government has allocated for a full year of national transport infrastructure. Annualised, the same modest levy would run to roughly US$2.5 billion — more than double it.

This is not this news-media’s number. It is Ram’s proposed rate, applied transparently to the government’s own disclosed revenue figures, using the most conservative available base — Stabroek Block revenue alone, not Exxon’s global profit, which would produce a far larger figure still. We show the arithmetic because we expect it to be checked, not taken on faith.

That is the distinction between an argument and an accusation, and it is one this publication insists on holding itself to even where — perhaps especially where — the conclusion is damning.

WHERE THE DEFERENCE LANDS

None of this financial architecture directly funded the Transport and Harbours Department, and this publication will not claim otherwise. What can be documented is a government that, across the same period it declined even a modest participation mechanism in record oil profits, allowed the maritime safety apparatus responsible for the nation’s ferry fleet to run on a skeleton crew.

MARAD disclosed as far back as March 2022 that it had only six certified marine surveyors for more than 2,000 vessels. The ministry vowed then that this “cannot be business as usual.” The department was still advertising a vacant surveyor post as late as December 2025 — weeks before the MV Barima, an 87-year-old vessel, sank on July 18, 2026, killing more than a hundred people, the majority of them Indigenous Guyanese from riverain and hinterland communities the ferry existed to serve.

We do not assert a direct causal line between a specific undeclared windfall tax dollar and a specific safety failure aboard that vessel.

We do assert this: a government that treats a foreign oil consortium’s comfort as a fixed constraint, and its own citizens’ safety infrastructure as a discretionary line item, has made a choice about whose interests bend first. Guyana is the resource’s true owner. It has spent 2026 collecting a fraction of the windfall its own resource produced, while the vessels carrying its poorest and most remote citizens sailed on borrowed time.

The oil will not last this generation, by Ram’s own reckoning. Neither, evidently, will the government’s patience for the people it was elected to serve first.

— The Board