Blogs

Guyana isn't the Caribbean's first oil economy. It's just the newest — and the most closely watched — in a region where Trinidad and Tobago spent a century running the same experiment first. For over 100 years and more than three billion cumulative barrels, oil and gas built modern Trinidad: the Point Lisas industrial estate, the region's largest gas processing complex, decades of the highest living standards in the English-speaking Caribbean. Today, that same industry is in structural decline, its flagship state oil company broken apart, its only refinery shuttered since 2018. For Guyana, still in the early, exhilarating stage of its own boom, Trinidad's trajectory isn't ancient history. It's the most relevant cautionary tale available.

The Long Decline Guyana Hasn't Faced Yet

Trinidad's oil production peaked at roughly 278,000 barrels per day in the 1970s. By 2005 it had fallen to around 144,000 bpd — still healthy, but already sliding. Two decades later, production sits under 54,000 bpd: a fall of more than 80% from peak, and a 67% drop even from the more recent 2005 high. Natural gas, which took over as the country's dominant hydrocarbon resource in the early 1990s, has followed a similar downward path, with LNG, methanol, and ammonia output all trending lower through the 2020s even as short-term monthly numbers occasionally tick up.

This is the arc every oil-producing nation eventually faces — reserves deplete, fields mature, production costs rise as extraction gets harder. Guyana, with the Stabroek Block's estimated 11 billion barrels of recoverable resources and production still climbing toward a targeted 1.7 million bpd by 2030, is decades from that stage. But Trinidad's experience is a reminder that the current boom has a shelf life, and how a country spends the good years determines how it survives the lean ones.

The Petrotrin Collapse: A Warning About State Oil Companies

The most visceral lesson from Trinidad is what happened to Petrotrin, the state-owned oil and gas company that for decades symbolized national ownership of the industry. By 2018, Petrotrin was carrying government-reported accumulated losses of roughly TT$8 billion (US$1.2 billion) between 2013 and 2018, debts of TT$12 billion (US$1.8 billion), and TT$3 billion (US$443 million) owed to the government in unpaid taxes and royalties. Its refinery — 101 years old, and increasingly dependent on imported crude to keep running because domestic production could no longer supply it — was losing money on every barrel it processed.

In November 2018, the government closed the refinery entirely and broke Petrotrin into separate entities for exploration, fuel trading, and refinery asset management. Roughly 5,500 permanent and temporary workers lost their jobs in a single stroke. The human toll, in communities like Pointe-à-Pierre where oil work had passed from parent to child across generations, was severe — former workers describe the closure as not just a job loss but the end of "a way of life." Years later, some workers who took security-guard jobs after losing refinery careers were still describing the transition as "extremely difficult," including the loss of medical benefits that came with Petrotrin employment. As recently as early 2026, talk of reopening the refinery was generating cautious hope — and equally cautious skepticism — in South Trinidad, underscoring how long the economic scar has lingered.

Why this matters for Guyana: Guyana's oil sector runs on a different model — production-sharing contracts with ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC, rather than a Petrotrin-style national oil company directly owning and refining crude. That structural difference offers Guyana some insulation from Petrotrin's specific failure mode. But the underlying warning generalizes: an oil-dependent economy built around infrastructure and institutions that assume permanently rising production is fragile the moment that assumption breaks. Trinidad believed its refinery and its production levels were permanent fixtures of national life until, over roughly four decades, they weren't.

Fuel Security Is Not the Same as Oil Wealth

A more immediate and less obvious lesson: producing oil doesn't guarantee a country can fuel itself. Trinidad's Energy Chamber has pointed to this directly, noting that Guyana experienced a temporary fuel shortage that left motorists in one of the world's fastest-growing oil-producing nations confused about how shortages could happen there at all. Trinidad's own experience is instructive here too — since the Petrotrin refinery closed in 2018, the country has continued importing substantial volumes of refined petroleum products (diesel and gasoline especially), meaning that despite Trinidad's century of oil production, it remains dependent on foreign refining capacity for its own fuel supply. Extraction and self-sufficiency are two different problems, and a producer nation can fail at the second even while succeeding at the first.

Diversification: The Lesson Both Countries Are Still Failing to Fully Learn

Trinidad's government and energy analysts have spent years publicly acknowledging that the country needs to diversify beyond hydrocarbons — into green hydrogen, downstream petrochemicals, financial services, tourism — while continuing, in practice, to treat the energy sector as the primary "pillar" of economic recovery even through the pandemic and beyond. That gap between diversification rhetoric and continued oil-dependent budgeting is arguably Trinidad's deepest structural problem, and it's one commentators are already flagging as a live risk for Guyana. Guyana's Natural Resource Fund and Local Content Act represent more structured attempts to convert oil revenue into broader development than Trinidad had in its early decades — but Guyana is also simultaneously increasing public debt even as it draws down its savings fund, a pattern regional economists have explicitly compared to the same resource-dependency trap that constrained Trinidad.

The Bottom Line for Guyana

Trinidad and Tobago's history offers Guyana three concrete, practical warnings:

1. Production peaks and declines — plan the exit before you need it. Trinidad's fall from 278,000 bpd to under 54,000 bpd took place over roughly five decades without a fully diversified economy to absorb the transition. Guyana has a narrow window, while production is still climbing, to build non-oil sectors capable of employing people once the Stabroek Block matures.
2. State oil institutions can become liabilities as fast as they become assets. Petrotrin's collapse and the loss of 5,500 jobs show what happens when a national oil company's finances are allowed to deteriorate for years before action is taken. Guyana's different contractual structure with international operators reduces this specific risk, but not the broader one of over-relying on any single institution or revenue stream.
3. Domestic fuel security has to be built deliberately — it doesn't happen automatically. Even after a century of production, Trinidad still imports significant fuel volumes. Guyana's own recent shortage suggests the same gap is already visible early in its boom, not just a distant future risk.

Guyana is, in most respects, better positioned than Trinidad was at a comparable stage — it has a sovereign wealth fund, a local content framework, and the advantage of watching a regional neighbor's mistakes in real time. Whether that advantage translates into a different outcome will depend less on the size of the Stabroek Block and more on whether Georgetown treats Trinidad's hundred-year experiment as a warning or a footnote.

This piece is a companion to Caribshout's earlier briefing on Guyana's oil boom and its impact on jobs, feeder industries, and housing. Read that piece for the ground-level view of how the boom is affecting ordinary Guyanese today.

Comments are always Welcomed!