Dr. Carla Crawford was not trained for oil and gas. “I still practice as a physician,” she said. But the skills she learned from running a medical practice helped her understand business, people, and the patience needed to build something from the ground up.
That experience is now part of her work as Director and Co-Owner of Friedlander Guyana, a company trying to grow local fabrication capacity for Guyana’s oil and gas sector. Dr. Crawford co-owns the company with her husband, Donald. Friedlander Guyana was formed through a partnership between their Guyanese company, Deep Water Oil and Gas Services and Consultants Inc., and Friedlander, a French company.
She shared that the connection started after a recommendation from one of the oil companies. Friedlander was looking for a Guyanese partner. Deep Water Oil and Gas was also looking for a partner.
“When we met with them, [in] several discussions, we realized that they were the best fit, because their vision was to come to Guyana and train Guyanese people, and to do the fabrication for the [floating production, storage and offloading vessels] here in Guyana, as opposed to having to outsource,” Dr. Crawford said.
Deep Water Oil and Gas was incorporated in 2017. Crawford said the full process of forming Friedlander Guyana took time because of the required paperwork and logistics. The company has been operating in Guyana for about two years. It started with about five people.
“One was my cousin, who gathered a lot of resumes, then we started that way by kind of word of mouth,” she recalled. The company also reached workers by going into communities and speaking directly with people about the work it wanted to do. The company now has about 25 employees from different parts of Guyana.
She shared that Friedlander Guyana has done small projects for SBM Offshore and is currently doing work for Rubis. She also said the company has a major contract with G Mining to build tanks and pipes.
The company recently completed high-pressure process piping fabrication work for the Liza Unity FPSO. That work was done with SBM Offshore and ExxonMobil Guyana as part of the Water Injection Riser Depressurization project. For her, the significance is not only the project itself. It is that Guyanese workers are being trained to take on work that would otherwise be done outside of the country.
She said Friedlander Guyana had to start with limited local fabrication capacity available in the market.
“We did our research, and there was maybe one other company that was doing some fabrication, a Trinidadian company, but they were doing their fabrication really in Trinidad,” Dr. Crawford said.
Training became an early priority. Crawford said Friedlander brought in experienced workers to support the local team. Some Guyanese workers were also sent to Angola for training.
The work also required Crawford to learn the oil and gas industry quickly. She said she had to study the terms, the abbreviations, and the standards used in the sector.
“At the beginning, I had to get a book with just knowing abbreviations, you know, understanding what it is, just every detail,” she said.
Dr. Crawford said one of the biggest challenges was proving that she, and the company, could do the work. She said her background in medicine did not separate her from business. It helped prepare her for it. “I built my practice, and that was, you know, business. You had to deal with people, the psychology of people,” she added.
Her advice to women who want to enter the oil and gas sector is to study the industry and be prepared to do the work. “It’s there for the taking. You just have to have the mindset that you can do it,” she said. “Educate yourself as much as possible.”
Crawford said returning to Guyana was always part of the plan for her and her husband, even before the country became an oil producer.
“We always wanted to come back to Guyana after we trained and you know specialized in our fields,” she said. “We knew that we were coming back to Guyana, even before oil and gas.”
And then Guyana’s oil and gas development gave them another reason to return. “When oil and gas happened, we said for sure we would like to be part of this new sector in Guyana,” she shared.
