Guyana's new crude frontier?

The Liza oil find offers the promise of an economic boost for the country but the government must plot its course carefully

The 2015 oil discovery at Liza, offshore Guyana, was a landmark well. It marked the end of an eight-year campaign to find a follow-up to the 1.8bn-barrel Jubilee play, which opened Ghana's Tano Basin in 2007. The search, along what is known as the Atlantic Transform Margin, had until now proved elusive: 24 unsuccessful wells had been drilled at a cost of $3.4bn (probably more than $6bn when seismic and general and administrative costs are included). Like Jubilee, the trap at Liza appears subtle and largely stratigraphic in nature: one not easily seen in the seismic data without sophisticated geophysical processing. The geological age of the source rock and reservoir are similar, consisting o