Sunday Brief: Exxon Keeps $23.6 Billion While We Get the Leftovers, Ali Tells Us to 'Brace' for More Pain, and Apparently the Strait of Hormuz Is Now Our Problem

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Good Sunday morning, Guyana. The papers this weekend read like a collective exhale, and not the good kind. The kind where you realize you have been holding your breath for four years and the air finally comes out sounding like a tire deflating on the East Bank Highway. Pour your coffee. Let us walk through it.

1. The ExxonMobil arithmetic that refuses to go away

Kaieteur ran the numbers again and they still do not add up in our favour. Between 2020 and 2024, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC — the Stabroek Block partners — pulled in US$29 billion in profits. Guyana, the sovereign nation on whose seabed this oil is sitting, received US$5.4 billion in the same period. This is our “50/50 partnership.” The math is, as dem boys would say, mathing in a particular direction.

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Sunday Brief: Exxon Keeps $23.6 Billion While We Get the Leftovers, Ali Tells Us to 'Brace' for More Pain, and Apparently the Strait of Hormuz Is Now Our Problem

1. The ExxonMobil arithmetic that refuses to go away