Guyana’s offshore oil production is on the cusp of a historic milestone. President Dr. Irfaan Ali announced this week that the country’s fifth floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel is due to arrive off Guyana’s coast within days, a development expected to push national crude output above 1 million barrels per day for the first time.

The Fifth Vessel

The new FPSO, named Errea Wittu — meaning “abundance” in an indigenous Guyanese language — set sail from a shipyard in Singapore in early August and is expected to arrive offshore this week. The Uaru field is estimated to hold more than 800 million barrels of oil and will also add gas treatment capacity of 540 million cubic feet per day. First oil is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026.

Guyana’s four currently operating FPSOs — Liza Destiny, Liza Unity, Prosperity, and One Guyana — are together producing between roughly 900,000 and 920,000 barrels per day. Once Errea Wittu comes online, combined national output is expected to push past the 1-million-barrel threshold, and some industry estimates suggest daily production could approach 1.2 million barrels before year-end.

Overtaking Venezuela trailing only Brazil

The 1-million-barrel mark is more than symbolic. At that level of output, Guyana — a nation of fewer than one million people that produced its first barrel of oil only in December 2019 — would overtake Venezuela to become South America’s second-largest oil producer, trailing only Brazil.

It is a remarkable trajectory for a country that, prior to ExxonMobil’s 2015 discovery in the Stabroek Block, had no oil industry at all. In under seven years, Guyana has gone from first exploration success to a producer pumping close to a million barrels a day, driven by a string of major discoveries — more than 11 billion oil-equivalent barrels identified so far across the Stabroek Block.

Guyana’s Rising Take

Alongside the production milestone, President Ali used the announcement to highlight how the country’s financial share of the oil is climbing. Under the production-sharing terms first set out in the 2016 agreement with the Stabroek co-venturers (ExxonMobil, Hess/Chevron, and CNOOC), royalties are paid first, followed by cost recovery of up to 75% of production, with the remainder split evenly between Guyana and the consortium.

Because the co-venturers’ initial capital investment is being recovered faster than originally projected, Guyana’s effective share of Stabroek Block oil has risen sharply — from 12.5% to 39.8%, according to the President. In practical terms, where roughly 75 of every 100 barrels produced once went toward cost recovery, only about 20 barrels do today, meaning a much larger share of production now flows directly to state revenue.

That shift is already showing up in the numbers: Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund received approximately US$343.4 million in oil revenues in July 2026 alone.