Tiny Guyana may soon be thrust into the ranks of the world’s top oil producers

Impoverished nation can choose how to invest windfall royalties

Today's expression: On par with
Explore more: Lesson #247
April 2, 2020:

There’s a new oil producer on the block. Guyana, a tiny nation of less than a million people, and the third-poorest nation in South America, just discovered oil reserves off its coast. Guyana is on the cusp of a critical national decision, one that may determine whether the oil will bring its citizens fortune or misfortune. Plus, learn the English phrase “on par with.”

Be your best self in English

Move confidently through the English-speaking world

Listen

  • Learning speed
  • Full speed

Learn

TranscriptActivitiesDig deeperYour turn
No translationsEspañol中文FrançaisPortuguês日本語ItalianoDeutschTürkçePolski

Tiny Guyana may soon be thrust into the ranks of the world’s top oil producers

Hi there, welcome to another Plain English lesson, number 247. The full lesson is available at PlainEnglish.com/247. I’m Jeff, JR is the producer, and you are the best audience in the world. That’s what someone said last year and I couldn’t agree more.

Coming up today: Oil is starting to flow off the coast of Guyana, a tiny South American nation of less than a million people. How will Guyana use its newfound oil wealth? That’s what we’ll explore on today’s lesson. In the second half of the audio lesson, we’ll talk about the English phrase “on par with.” The video lesson at PlainEnglish.com/247 is about the word “barely.” And of course JR has a song of the week.


Guyana’s oil windfall

It’s called “black gold”: black, because that’s how it looks when it comes out of the ground, and gold, because it makes everyone who touches it rich. Despite all the press and attention around renewable energy sources in recent years, oil is still a major driver of the world economy.

So when ExxonMobil announced in 2015 that it had discovered oil sandstone reserves about 125 miles off the coast of Guyana, the fortunes of South America’s third-poorest nation looked a bit brighter. At the time, neither ExxonMobil nor the Guyanese citizens had any idea exactly how much oil would eventually be found. Today, the scale of the discovery is clearer.

Guyana is sitting on about 8 billion barrels of oil, enough to put it in the top 20 countries in the world, in terms of total oil reserves. The country struck a deal with ExxonMobil that allows the American company to extract the oil and pay the country’s government a royalty. ExxonMobil hopes to be extracting 750,000 barrels of oil per day by 2025. The fortunes of Guyana’s 780,000 citizens may—and I emphasize may—change forever.

Guyana is a poor and struggling country. Public education for children is abysmal: although kids spend twelve years in school, they graduate having learned only about seven years of material. Four-fifths of its university graduates leave the country, so meager are the opportunities at home. Over 90 percent of the country’s inhabitants live in low-lying areas that are prone to flooding; though the country is about the size of São Paulo state in Brazil, the vast majority of its land area is uninhabited, dense forest. Guyana’s infrastructure is weak: barely seven percent of roadways are paved and power cuts are common. Infant and maternal mortality is high. Guyana has the world’s highest suicide rate.

Oil riches could transform Guyana. The country’s GDP per person, in nominal terms, is about $5,000, the third-lowest in South America, ahead of only Bolivia and Venezuela. Some estimates suggest the nation’s GDP per person could more than triple, putting it well ahead of many other countries on the continent and on par with regional leaders like Chile and Uruguay.

Unlike many countries in Latin America, Guyana does not have a state oil company and doesn’t have a well-developed oil extraction industry. It will therefore allow ExxonMobil to extract the oil, and it will charge a royalty for each barrel of oil extracted. A royalty is simply like a tax applied to the amount of a resource that is taken from the ground.

The government set up a sovereign wealth fund to hold the royalty payments. A sovereign wealth fund is like a big national savings and investment account. This is a model followed by Norway, which has built up enormous national wealth, and many Middle Eastern countries.

According to Guyana’s plans, the sovereign wealth fund can only be used for long-term projects like infrastructure—which the country badly needs—and not to pay for day-to-day expenses. In principle, this is unquestionably a good idea. If you have any doubts about that, look at neighboring Venezuela, which used its oil wealth to shower citizens with money and buy votes—only to see that money collapse as the supply of oil depleted.

Foreign bankers are said to be bombarding Guyana with offers to lend them money, backed by future oil royalties. The government has wisely rejected these offers, not wanting to bury its citizens in debt so soon after the discovery. Better to be patient and control their own destiny via the wealth-fund rather than go on a debt-fueled spending spree now, government ministers say. The fact that any government had the spine to stand up to that temptation is a reason for optimism. The finance minister said he was committed to avoiding the “resource curse.” The resource curse is the term to describe the pattern, repeated over and over around the world, where natural resource discoveries leave corrupt government ministers fat and happy, but the country’s citizens as poor as ever.

So Guyana is off to a good start. But there are some warning signs. Its politics are tribal. Instead of having two or more parties compete on the basis of ideas, the two main parties compete based on ethnic loyalties. This generally leads to favoritism, corruption, and a stagnation of ideas and progress. The current president, David Granger, was up for re-election on March 2. A winner has still not been announced and some fear he may be trying to manipulate his way into a second term. If he forces his way into a second term with a cloud over his head, his government will have lost much of its legitimacy. If he loses, the opposition party would take the reins of government and loosen some protections on the oil revenues.

Guyana is on the cusp of a critical national decision. It can become more like Venezuela, Angola or Nigeria, whose leaders became wealthy and powerful but whose citizens were deprived of any benefit. Or it can become more like Norway, Singapore, or the US state of Alaska, where the funds are saved, reinvested, and ultimately used to benefit future generations.


I wanted to take a moment and report some results from the Plain English listener survey. We had several hundred people take the survey, so thank you very much to all of you who did so. If you haven’t taken the survey, you can still do so at PlainEnglish.com/survey.

The first question I asked was, Why are you studying English? Over half of you said, to improve in your career. I know from correspondence that that is a big reason why people are studying English, and indeed 51 percent of you said that career improvement is your primary reason for studying. Seventeen percent said leisure, like travel, music, and movies, while fourteen percent said it was to maintain the knowledge you already had.

In the next section, I listed eight statements and asked you if any of these were true for you. You could choose one, all, none, or any combination. Out of the eight choices I gave, the most popular choices were: number one, “It’s hard for me to express complex ideas;” number two, “I feel shy or embarrassed when speaking in English;” and number three, “It’s hard to understand native speakers at their full speed.”

Here’s one that surprised me. One of the statements was, “I don’t have anyone to talk to in English,” and 46 percent of you said that was true. It surprised me that this was so high. As an English speaker, I just figured that English speakers are everywhere, but it looks like a lot of you don’t have speaking partners in English. Maybe—just maybe—we’ll work to do something about that in the future of Plain English.

One more survey response I’ll share. I suspected that since you’re listening to English lessons that you’d want to hear about the English-speaking world. And at various points in the history of Plain English, I’ve wondered whether I should concentrate more, if not exclusively, on things happening in the English-speaking world. So one of the questions asked if you’d prefer only hearing about topics related to the English-speaking world, and only 15 percent of you said yes!

To be honest, I’m relieved because I love researching and writing episodes about the whole world—like this one about Guyana. I especially like the ones about Japan—the crying coaches, the nap rooms—so I’m glad you guys enjoy those too.

Learn English the way it’s really spoken

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

Starter feature

We speak your language

Learn English words faster with instant, built-in translations of key words into your language

QuizListeningPronunciationVocabularyGrammar

Free Member Content

Join free to unlock this feature

Get more from Plain English with a free membership


Starter feature

Test your listening skills

Make sure you’re hearing every word. Listen to an audio clip, write what you hear, and get immediate feedback


Starter feature

Upgrade your pronunciation

Record your voice, listen to yourself, and compare your pronunciation to a native speaker’s

Starter feature

Sharpen your listening

Drag the words into the correct spot in this interactive exercise based on the Plain English story you just heard


Starter feature

Improve your grammar

Practice choosing the right verb tense and preposition based on real-life situations



Free Member Content

Join free to unlock this feature

Get more from Plain English with a free membership

Plus+ feature

Practice sharing your opinion

Get involved in this story by sharing your opinion and discussing the topic with others

Expression: On par with