There is a particular kind of institutional confidence that borders on recklessness. It is the confidence of an agency that has convinced itself that its officers are so thoroughly qualified, so supremely analytical, and so infallibly correct in their assessments that formal environmental studies are largely unnecessary. This appears to be the operating philosophy of the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency, and the evidence is growing that this philosophy is costing the country dearly.
The EPA’s latest act of institutional self-assurance is its decision to waive an Environmental Impact Assessment for Halliburton Guyana Inc.’s planned transportation of oil and gas chemicals, equipment, and tools across Regions Three, Four, Five, and Six. The project, which will last at least 10 years, involves the movement of materials that the company itself acknowledges carry risks including chemical spills, environmental contamination, fire, toxic release, air pollution, and personal injury. The EPA’s response to this list of acknowledged hazards? Ratchet straps and driver training will suffice.
This would be unremarkable if it were an isolated case. It is not. A review of the EPA’s conduct reveals a pattern of reflexive waivers, legal defeats, and downstream consequences that the Guyanese public has been left to absorb. In December 2022, a High Court judge ruled that the EPA acted unlawfully in waiving an EIA for SLB’s Source Storage and Calibration Facility, finding that the agency had breached its statutory duty under the Environmental Protection Act. In October 2025, the High Court quashed an operating permit issued to Global Oil Environmental Services for an oil and gas waste facility in Coverden, ruling that the EPA had failed to follow the requirements of the EP Act. The court described the waiver as a procedural impropriety and found the permit to be invalid. At least seven judicial review cases have now been filed against the EPA in matters relating to the oil and gas sector.
The most consequential failure, however, may be the one hardest to prove but most painfully felt: the collapse of fish catches along Guyana’s coastline. As offshore oil and gas activity expanded rapidly from 2019 onward, artisanal and industrial fisherfolk began reporting their worst seasons in living memory. Catch volumes dropped year on year. Families that had depended on the sea for generations found themselves unable to meet basic expenses. The government’s own response tells the story: in 2022, President Ali announced a one-off cash relief grant of $150,000 for fisherfolk, a measure that ultimately put over $1.1 billion into the hands of approximately 7,500 individuals across Regions Two to Six. When a government pays that kind of emergency relief to an entire industry, it is not a vote of confidence in its own environmental safeguards. It is an admission that something went wrong and that the people who were told not to worry should have been worried.
Environmentalists and researchers have long challenged the official position that offshore oil operations bear no responsibility for the decline in fish stocks. Environmentalist Simone Mangal-Joly formally challenged the EPA and the government to produce credible evidence that comprehensive monitoring of offshore impacts on fisheries had ever been conducted. No such evidence was forthcoming. An independent academic review of Guyana’s EIA system, published in a peer-reviewed journal, rated the country’s preparedness for oil and gas oversight as only partially prepared across all criteria, with baseline data collection and physical capacity identified as areas still in embryonic development.
This is the context in which the EPA routinely declares that impact assessments are not needed. And yet, the rest of the world disagrees. The United States, the European Union, China, and international bodies including the UN, MARPOL, and the International Labour Organization all require structured risk assessments for hazardous materials transport, including quantitative modelling of accident scenarios, population exposure analysis, groundwater and air quality impact projections, and route-specific risk mapping. China has conducted formal risk assessments for hazardous materials road transport using Gaussian dispersion models to simulate chemical releases across residential and ecological zones. These are not academic exercises. They are the baseline of responsible governance.
If Guyana’s EPA officers are truly capable of making informed determinations on complex environmental questions without conducting formal studies, then the country is sitting on an extraordinary and largely wasted resource. Environmental regulators of that calibre should be consulting for the Caribbean, advising on EIA frameworks from Trinidad to Jamaica, and generating foreign exchange through the export of expertise. Instead, their primary contribution appears to be the generation of waivers.
The EPA’s mandate is not to facilitate oil and gas operations. It is to protect the Guyanese environment and the people who depend on it. When courts repeatedly overturn its decisions, when fisherfolk require government bailouts, and when the agency continues to exempt project after project from scrutiny, the public is entitled to ask a simple question: what exactly is the EPA for?
SOURCE: Editorial. Guyana1News, May 6, 2026
