Bobby Gossai Jnr., Senior Petroleum Coordinator at the Ministry of Natural Resources, says Guyana’s local content policy must go beyond jobs and contracts by ensuring foreign expertise is transferred to local companies and workers.
Speaking on the August 17 edition of the Energy Perspectives podcast, Gossai explained that the broader goal is to build Guyanese capacity to provide increasingly specialized services to the oil and gas sector.
He pointed to partnerships and joint ventures between international and Guyanese companies as a way to transfer technical skills and industry knowledge into the local market.
“We want those skills to be transferred here, for that know-how to be known in Guyana, and for it to evolve over time and be adapted by different people, by different companies, so that everything that we talk about when it comes to the specialization of the oil and gas sector can be sourced from Guyana,” he explained.
Local content performance is already measured through indicators such as the number of contractors and workers involved in the sector and the amount of money spent locally. Gossai said the government also wants to assess how companies reinvest their local earnings.
“We want to see how much of that local profitability is used for further investment and reinvestment, whether that is building your staff complement, whether that is training your people, or whether that is expanding your business,” he stated.
Guyana enacted its Local Content Act in December 2021 to increase participation by Guyanese workers and businesses in the oil and gas sector through employment and procurement requirements.
The government is considering amendments to expand the areas covered by the framework as Guyanese companies develop capabilities across the petroleum supply chain. After consultations with the private sector, the government has derived and is actively considering a set of proposed changes.
A six-month consultation will also be conducted with communities across Guyana to identify additional goods and services that Guyanese businesses can supply to the oil and gas sector and related industries.
