A GBJ Note · Oil & Gas
Longtail and the Word “Could”
On Guyana’s First Gas Project
Exxon’s eighth Stabroek development is the first built around gas. Whether that gas ever reaches Guyanese homes and industry has not yet been decided — and the deciding is our work.
By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · Brooklyn, New York · November 13, 2026
From an oil story to a gas story
On Thursday, ExxonMobil and its partners took the final investment decision on Longtail, the eighth development in the Stabroek Block. The headline figure is large: an additional US$12.5 billion, with start-up targeted for 2030 now that the government has approved the field development plan. The more important fact, as Mining Weekly reports, is what kind of project this is. Longtail is the first development in Guyana built to produce natural gas and condensate that is not associated with oil.
For seven projects, we have been an oil story. Longtail is the beginning of a gas story, and a gas story is different in one fundamental respect. Oil goes on a tanker and leaves. Gas can come ashore. What happens to it then is a choice that we, as a nation, still have to make.
Oil goes on a tanker and leaves. Gas can come ashore. What happens to it then is a choice that we, as a nation, still have to make.
— T.R.B.
What was approved
The project will use a floating production, storage and offloading vessel (an FPSO) designed to process 1.2 billion standard cubic feet of gas a day and to produce up to 250,000 barrels a day of condensate, a light liquid that comes out of the gas stream. Roughly 45 subsea production and injection wells are planned.
According to the Ministry of Natural Resources, as reported by Kaieteur News, Longtail will be developed as a multi-field project drawing on nine reservoirs, and the new licence carries provisions tailored to a non-associated gas development. The ownership is unchanged: ExxonMobil Guyana holds 45 percent, Hess Guyana Exploration (now part of Chevron) 30 percent, and CNOOC 25 percent.
The sentence to read twice
The company’s own release contains the line that matters most for Guyanese households. Gas from Longtail could be piped to shore, but only subject to future investment decisions, market demand, and the development of the necessary infrastructure.
That is three conditions attached to one “could.” None of them is met by Thursday’s decision.
We should hold this alongside two other facts. First, Guyana has pressed for more gas to be delivered onshore for potential industrial projects, including a fertilizer plant and data centres. Second, Reuters reported earlier that the government is weighing whether to scale back its liquefied natural gas ambitions, because Exxon will need more gas than expected for reinjection into the oilfields to maximise oil output. Put plainly, the same gas is wanted for three purposes: pushing oil out of the reservoir, lighting and powering the coast, and building new industry. It cannot do all three at full volume.
What we should be asking
A young reader meeting this for the first time should know that economists have a name for countries that earn a great deal from a resource yet fail to build a broader economy from it: the resource curse, with its cousin, Dutch disease. Gas is one of the few tools that can work against that pattern, because cheap, reliable domestic energy lowers the cost of manufacturing, agro-processing and everyday life. Oil revenue sits in a fund. Gas, if it comes ashore, sits in the economy.
So the questions for the next four years are concrete:
- Who decides how Longtail’s gas is allocated between reinjection, power and industry?
- What volume, if any, is committed to shore, and on what timeline?
- Who pays for the pipeline, and at what price will gas reach Guyanese users?
- Will the provisions in the new licence be published so that citizens can read them?
Longtail is a significant decision. It is also an unfinished one.
The investment has been approved. The national benefit has not yet been designed.
That design is our work, and the time to do it is before 2030, not after.
Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D., is Dean (Interim), School of Science and Allied Health, and Professor of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and the Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal. He is a former Visitor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a former Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT. The views expressed here are his own.
The Guyana Business Journal is supported by Metallica Commodities Corporation (metallicacc.com), Pebble Stream™ (pebblestream.com), CISS (caribshipatl.com · 770-322-3111) and MCCGUSA (mccgusa.com · 212-269-6126). Sponsors have no editorial role. Individual supporters: Courtney Noel | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard | Clarence Bone.
🇬🇾 Support independent Guyanese analysis: guyanabusinessjournal.com/donate/
The Small Islanders