Guyana’s Accergy

A graphic in yesterday’s Visual Capitalist showed the countries where GDP per capita has grown fastest since 1990. Guyana was at the top, with real GDP per person up 1,549 per cent, ahead of China at 1,404 per cent.¹ The ranking is slightly absurd: a small South American country appears to have outgrown the economic transformation of China.

»Accergy is the gap between potential and practical reach«

Why? Oil. In 2015, ExxonMobil announced a major offshore discovery, and production began in 2019. Almost overnight, Guyana went from producing very little oil to producing more than 200 million barrels a year.² Guyana didn’t just become richer. Its economic possibilities changed dramatically.

Are the people in Guyana now 1,549 per cent richer? Probably not. But the more interesting question is what happens when something suddenly becomes possible that was previously impossible.

Oil is physical matter containing enormous amounts of stored energy. Once extracted, that energy becomes available to an economic system: revenue, foreign exchange, infrastructure, salaries, investment, purchasing power. A geological deposit becomes a number, the number becomes money, and money expands the range of things the system could do.

Thermodynamics has a useful word for something related to this. Exergy is the amount of energy in a system that is actually available to perform useful work, given the state of the system and its environment. The word was coined in the 1950s, but describes a fundamental distinction: energy can exist without being available in a useful form.³

We don’t have an equivalent word for systems more generally. Suppose a country suddenly has enough money to build a university, a port, or a new industry. Those things just became possible. But possible isn’t the same as accessible. A country can have the money to build a university without enough professors to teach in it, or the money for a port without the engineers needed to build one. So perhaps we need a word for the potential that a system can actually access.

Let’s call that the accergy of the system.

And rather than the total set of things a system could theoretically do, let’s say that accergy is the portion of that possibility space that its existing organisation, knowledge, institutions, relationships, and agency allow it to reach.

This distinction becomes particularly important when change happens fast, because different parts of a system reorganise at different speeds. Sociologist William Ogburn described this as cultural lag: changes in one part of society outrun changes elsewhere.⁴ The oil can arrive quickly. A port takes years. A university takes decades. Administrative capabilities and institutional habits can take longer still.

Psychiatrist and cybernetics pioneer Ross Ashby gave us another useful piece of the puzzle. His Law of Requisite Variety says, roughly, that a system needs enough variety in its responses to cope with the variety of states it encounters.⁵ The more complicated the environment, the more varied the available responses have to be.

Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund is one institutional response to that challenge – more resources don’t just provide more power, they provide more choices, and deciding what to do next becomes a challenge in its own right. Rather than allowing all petroleum revenue to get spent immediately, the fund regulates withdrawals, preserves wealth, and spreads the benefits of an exhaustible resource across time. In 2026, the government plans to withdraw around US$2.37 billion from the fund while retaining billions of dollars in it.⁶

The fund is more than a savings mechanism. It preserves optionality. Money not spent today remains available to a future version of the system, which may have better information, better institutions, or simply different problems to solve.

Accergy is the gap between potential and practical reach.

And that gap matters because successful action changes the system itself. A road creates access. A university creates knowledge. Knowledge creates industries. Industries create wealth. Wealth can create institutions capable of making yet more complex decisions. What begins as resource extraction becomes a transformation of the system’s own ability to act.

The energy was never the hard part. The accergy is.

References