Officials at Caribbean Energy Week have stressed the need for skilled labor to sustain offshore development as a priority.
Speaking on a panel in Paramaribo last Tuesday, Andrew Hepburn, Shell’s Country Chair for Suriname and São Tomé and Príncipe, said workforce capability remains a critical constraint.
“You may be able to have a big budget, you may be able to facilitate the infrastructure, if you got expendable resources, the logistics and everything you need to fast track; but there is no shortcut for a skilled workforce to have sustainability in any region that you are operating in,” he explained.
Artur Nunes da Silva, General Manager & Country Chair of Total Energies EP Suriname B.V., agreed with him. “We have a lot of lessons learned from Guyana. One of them being that perhaps we did come in a bit too close to the first oil. We have to invest in local capabilities but we also have learned to collaborate [to] make sure that the labor market here in Suriname will be ready in 2028 to support the GranMorgu operations,” Nunes da Silva said.
GranMorgu is Suriname’s first major offshore development, expected to add 220,000 barrels per day (b/d) in oil production.
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Pierre Gaté, Country Entry Manager for SBM Offshore, spoke about the importance of capacity building in the Guyana-Suriname Basin. “If we are talking about one infrastructure that we want, it is a training center. So capacity building both for the labor market and the supply chain, because at the end of the day, that is part of our successful mission,” he said.
The panel – Deepwater Excellence: Driving Growth in the Guyana-Suriname Basin, discussed the different but important issues of operations. The moderator was Marcus Cyrus, Caribbean Regional Director for Weatherford.
The Caribbean Energy Week event, held in Paramaribo, has brought together regional policymakers, investors and industry leaders to examine offshore development, energy security and the transition across the Caribbean.
