For years, the Caribbean economic conversation followed a familiar script. Tourism, remittances, debt, another hurricane season, another argument about air connectivity, and the eternal hope that somebody might finally make inter-island trade less complicated than shipping something through Miami.
Then Guyana found oil.
Now Suriname is preparing to follow.
It is easy to look at this as very good news for Guyana, potentially very good news for Suriname, and something for everybody else to watch from a respectable distance. That would miss much of what is happening.
The economic map of the region is changing.
Guyana has already passed the point where oil is simply a promising new industry. The IMF calculated that its economy grew at an average annual rate of 47 percent between 2022 and 2024. Oil led the charge, naturally, but the non-oil economy also expanded by more than 13 percent in 2024.
Those are not normal Caribbean numbers.
The Caribbean Development Bank illustrates the distortion rather neatly. Include Guyana and the Bank’s borrowing member countries grew by 4.7 percent in 2025. Take Guyana out and growth was just 0.6 percent.
One country can now visibly move the regional average.
Suriname is not there yet. Its economy still has plenty of problems, including inflation, debt and the consequences of earlier fiscal decisions. But offshore investment is arriving before the oil.
GranMorgu, operated by TotalEnergies with APA and Staatsolie, represents an investment of roughly US$10.5 billion. Production is scheduled for 2028, with capacity of about 220,000 barrels a day.
In a country of roughly 600,000 people, that is not just another industrial project.
Curaçao has noticed
Curaçao is already looking at the Guianas and asking a practical question: what can we sell them?
That is considerably more useful than wondering whether Curaçao will ever discover comparable quantities of oil itself.
Plans around Willemstad include expanding ship-repair capacity and positioning Bullenbaai as a possible storage and transshipment center for the growing offshore industries of Guyana and Suriname. Curaçao’s shipyard is considering an investment program of more than €100 million aimed partly at capturing that business.
Whether all of it happens is another matter. Caribbean governments have never been particularly shy about announcing opportunities before the customers arrive.
Still, the logic makes sense.
An offshore oil industry needs much more than an oil platform. It needs vessels, repairs, logistics, aviation, engineers, accommodation, financial services, insurance, training, food, warehouses and, somewhere in the chain, people capable of making complicated things arrive at the right place on Tuesday morning.
Guyana and Suriname cannot necessarily provide all of that themselves, particularly at the speed their energy industries are developing.
There is business here for their neighbors.
Trinidad and Tobago, of course, knows this territory better than most. Decades of oil, gas and petrochemicals produced engineers, service companies and industrial infrastructure that give it an obvious advantage.
But Trinidad is not the only place with something to offer.
Curaçao has ports, storage, maritime experience and ship-repair infrastructure. Barbados has developed a substantial professional-services sector. Jamaica has logistics ambitions of its own. The Dominican Republic has scale, manufacturing capacity and increasingly sophisticated logistics.
The opportunity is bigger than selling a few more Caribbean products to two suddenly wealthier countries. A service economy can grow around what is happening in the Guianas, and there is no particular reason all of it must be based in Georgetown or Paramaribo.
Then comes the difficult part
Oil money has a habit of making governments feel rich before their countries actually are.
Suriname is a useful warning. Its expected boom arrives while the country is still dealing with serious fiscal weaknesses. The IMF expects offshore production to push growth dramatically higher once production begins, but has also warned about the need for stronger institutions, fiscal discipline and careful management of the revenues.
Guyana has a different problem. How quickly can a relatively small country absorb extraordinary amounts of money and investment without producing inflation, bottlenecks, waste and an economy divided between those inside the boom and everybody else?
These aren’t questions only for Georgetown and Paramaribo.
If the boom produces little more than expensive apartments, imported SUVs and a magnificent collection of government contracts, the statistics will still look impressive. History may be less impressed.
What matters to the wider Caribbean is how much of the new economic activity escapes the oil fields and circulates through the region.
For most of the modern Caribbean economy, the compass has pointed north. The United States, Canada and Europe supplied tourists, investment, imports and export markets.
Now something interesting is happening on the southern edge of the Caribbean.
According to the OECD and Inter-American Development Bank, foreign direct investment into Guyana reached the equivalent of about 35 percent of GDP in 2024. Preliminary figures show similarly extraordinary investment flows into Suriname as GranMorgu moves forward.
Money on that scale creates its own traffic. Companies arrive, workers move, airlines add routes, ships need ports and businesses start looking for places from which they can service the new market.
Curaçao appears to have understood that.
Others will too.
The real question isn’t whether Guyana and Suriname will become richer. Barring a spectacular series of mistakes, that part looks increasingly likely.
The more interesting question is how much of that prosperity their Caribbean neighbors can persuade to cross the water.
Curaçao’s drydock and maritime sector have served Caribbean shipping for generations. The expansion of offshore energy in Guyana and Suriname could give that old advantage a new market.
Featured image: Anefo / Dutch National Archives — CC0, public domain.
