Known worldwide for its advanced technologies, serving energy and industrial companies, Baker Hughes has brought top-tier oilfield services to Guyana with the opening of a Supercenter on the East Bank Corridor at Land of Canaan.
A multi-million-dollar investment, the Supercenter sits on more than eight acres of land adjacent to the Demerara Harbour, the country’s main waterway and will support regional customers and bolster Baker Hughes’ localization efforts within South America.
Maria Claudia Borras, Executive Vice President for Oilfield Services at Baker Hughes, during the facility’s opening ceremony on Monday stated that the company was excited to bring “efficiency and simplification” to the country’s nascent oil sector.
She said, “Today’s announcement significantly expands Baker Hughes’ ability to support Guyana’s energy goals and leading oil and gas projects in the country.” “Baker Hughes is well-known in the region for service and technical excellence, and our new Guyana supercenter will bolster our efforts to expand even further into the evolving market.”
She said the company is proud to be in the new oil producing South American country and look forward to the next exciting phase of its work.
Baker Hughes Country Manager, Darryl Eisler explained that with a 15-year investment, the company has plans to expand further as the needs of the industry grow.
“There are other regions that we want to develop and grow from this facility, so this is one of our largest facilities in the Caribbean, and it is going to be able to be utilized for those frontier markets,” he explained.
Stressing heavily on Baker Hughes’ commitment to local content, Eisler said that 41 Guyanese have already been employed and at the end of five years, a total of 100 locals will be added.
“At the end of the day, hopefully…Guyanese are running this establishment. This is not going to be run by anybody that is not Guyanese,” he said.
Meanwhile, President Irfaan Ali deemed the opening of the Supercenter “a critical aspect” to the country’s national development strategy, noting that investors should not have any fears of doing business in Guyana.
“What we want to achieve through this development strategy is to create synergies with the local private sector, with the local society and that those synergies go beyond profit-making,” he said.
Key aspects of those collaborations, Mr. Ali said, include building strong community relationships and he urged the company to follow this path.
Baker Hughes currently provides drilling services, drill bits, and drilling and completion fluids to several drilling rigs, with its Completions and Wellbore Intervention product line supporting all upper completions for development wells in Guyana.
Baker Hughes’ Turbomachinery & Process Solutions (TPS) and Upstream Chemicals businesses also provide technology and solutions to the Liza Unity floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel in Guyana and other projects in the region.
The new Supercenter has been built together with Baker Hughes’ existing completion warehouse and liquid mud and completion fluids plant, providing full support to customers in Guyana and Suriname.
According to Baker Hughes, Guyana is an important strategic growth country for the company. The majority of all discoveries in Guyana are located in the Stabroek Block, where operator ExxonMobil has updated the estimated recoverable resources to approximately 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
