How South America became the up-and-coming oil capital of the world

Off Brazil’s northeastern coast, where the sediment-heavy water of the vast Amazon River tips out into the Atlantic, are two very different types of treasure. The first is an ecological gem: a 3,600 square-mile deepwater coral reef discovered less than a decade ago. The second treasure puts the first in immediate danger. Billions of barrels of oil may lie in the ancient sediments beneath the seabed, and licenses have just been approved to drill there.

A few hundred miles north, off the coast of Guyana, companies are already pumping around 650,000 barrels of oil a day from a huge deep-water reservoir discovered in 2015. The find has transformed this rainforest-carpeted country into the planet’s newest petrostate and highest oil producer per capita.

Several thousand miles inland to the south, the wide, dusty plains of western Argentina’s Vaca Muerta — “dead cow” in English — are dotted with oil wells. Fossil fuel production from this enormous shale deposit has boomed over the past decade, putting it on track to produce more than a million barrels a day by 2030, analysts predict.

Welcome to South America’s new oil frontier. “It’s really incredible how fast and how much it’s expanding,” said Nicole Figueiredo de Oliveira, the executive director at environmental non-profit Arayara.

Countries across the region are ramping up extraction but Brazil, Guyana and Argentina are at the forefront — among the top five drivers of global oil growth outside of OPEC, the group of major oil exporters.

They are three very different countries: an economic behemoth with an environment-championing president, a biodiversity hotspot with high rates of poverty and an economically volatile country led by a chainsaw-wielding climate denier. Yet they are united in their quest to expand oil production, arguing it’s vital to their economic and social development.

This new fossil fuel boom is happening just as the impacts of the climate crisis — driven by fossil fuels — are beginning to bite in ever more alarming ways. People in South America are dying in fires, floods, storms and droughts made longer and more catastrophic by climate change.

Brazil’s role as host of the COP30 climate conference, which is supposed to be a landmark summit where countries set out goals to radically reduce planet-heating pollution, adds a particular dissonance to this oil surge.

But as global oil demand stays strong, and other, richer, countries show few signs of scaling back, their argument is: Why shouldn’t oil supply come from South America?

The continent has a long history of fossil fuel extraction; it holds the second-largest reserves of oil and gas after the Middle East.