Guysons K + B Industries (GKB) plans to spend US$37.5 million to repurpose a factory located on Guyana’s East Coast corridor to provide oil country tubular goods (OCTG) and premium accessory services to the oil and gas sector.
GKB, a joint venture between the Guyanese Guysons Engineering and the US-based K + B Industries, first announced the project during the International Energy Conference and Expo last week.
The government has given GKB a 55-acre lease for property which includes what is currently a sugar packaging facility, to establish its manufacturing plant.
In a statement Wednesday, GKB said that it had approached the government hoping for land closer to Georgetown’s port facilities, but immediately found favour with the government’s recommendation of the Enmore facility. It explained that it would take 18-24 months to build a facility from the ground up, but that the packaging factory provided almost immediate operational potential.
With a nod to the government’s newly legislated local content framework, GKB said that the project will bring services home to Guyana.
“The OCTG and Premium Accessory Service that GKB provide is currently outsourced to Trinidad & Tobago, the United States of America, and farther afield. This initiative would increase commercial activity on the East Coast Corridor and tap into considerable foreign exchange earning potential, bringing greater Oil & Gas revenues to Guyana.”
While some local media discourse illuminated concerns about the fate of the workers of the current sugar packaging facility, GKB has committed to absorbing all of them. It went even further to say that the scale of employment will be a lifeline for unemployed residents along the East Coast corridor, including for former sugar workers who lost their jobs when the Enmore sugar estate closed a few years ago. GKB plans to employ 150 persons in the first year of operation, moving to about 500 by the end of year five.
“GKB has also agreed to strict land development timelines and milestones over the first three years that will be monitored as the phased development occurs.”
The company posited that its project would not only create jobs, but also put the East Coast corridor on the global oilfield map, encouraging prospective investors to establish operations there too. GKB sees this as the first step in a domino-effect of economic development for the corridor.
