Ready or not, Guyana nears oil output

The country's Liza find is among the most promising in Latin America, though some pitfalls lie ahead

Guyana, on the northeast coast of South America, has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak landscape for frontier oil exploration over the past couple of years. ExxonMobil's exploration success at the deep-water Liza field has the country on track to become the newest member of the club of oil-producing countries-possibly as soon as 2020. The Exxon-led consortium, which includes Hess and China's Cnooc, said in October that its third Liza exploration well had put recoverable resources for the field at the upper end of its 0.8m-1.4bn barrels of oil equivalent estimate, making it one of the largest offshore discoveries in the world in the past decade. The exploration success wi