In 2015, ExxonMobil struck liquid gold when it discovered eleven million barrels of oil off the coast of Guyana in a deposit called the Stabroek Block. Now Guyana is set to take in as much as $7.5 billion in oil revenue by 2040 — a staggering figure for a country whose GDP in 2014 was a mere $4.13 billion. Already the world’s third-largest petroleum producer per capita, churning out 660,000 barrels per day in 2024, the nation is en route to double that by 2027. Its GDP has shot through the ceiling, growing by a third in 2023 and a third again in 2024. GDP per capita projections increase in a line so steep as to be practically vertical. Life has changed in Guyana. Small luxuries of all sorts have accompanied the oil boom: Starbucks, rooftop restaurants, and karaoke bars.

Yet with this newfound fortune comes a new peril — what economists call the Dutch disease, which occurs when resource revenues increase the value of domestic currency at the expense of foreign currency, sending foreign investors elsewhere to stretch their dollars. At the same time, the Dutch disease sees countries overinvest in their resource economies, neglecting other sectors along the way and potentially jeopardizing the long-term stability of their economies for short-term prosperity.

The long term holds other perils as well. Guyana is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, with its capital city, Georgetown, critically threatened by rising sea levels, which already periodically lap over the top of the city’s 160-year-old sea-wall, while seawater leaches into and pollutes coastal wells. In that sense, Guyana’s nascent oil industry represents a kind of deal with the devil — one of the most lucrative in history.