Guyana President Irfaan Ali on Friday urged the country’s private sector to form a consortium capable of joining offshore operations by providing supply and other support vessels.
With the rapid growth of the offshore oil and gas sector, the country relies heavily on international fleets for logistics and deepwater marine support.
Speaking at the Guyana Oil & Gas Energy Chamber’s Annual Awards Dinner at the Marriott Hotel, Ali said the government will push early in the new year to establish a mechanism that enables local companies to enter the market for supply and support vessels jointly.
“There is one [initiative] that we started, that we must get done and dusted very quickly, and that is the opportunity in shipping with the supply vessels,” Ali said. “We must be able to put together a consortium here in Guyana that can be able to be part of the ecosystem…”
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The call forms part of the administration’s broader local content drive, anchored in the 2021 Local Content Act, which mandates 40 categories of oil-sector work for Guyanese firms and workers.
While hundreds of local companies have been certified by the Local Content Secretariat to benefit from preferential treatment, Ali’s administration continues to urge Guyanese companies to go beyond ‘low-hanging fruit’ when providing goods and services for the sector. Part of this movement includes having Guyanese companies join forces with more skilled foreign firms to build capacity.
During an event in October, Ali also said Guyana must develop the capacity to trade its own crude, a job currently being farmed out to British companies.
The administration plans to amend the Local Content Act to plug loopholes that cause value leakage and could add more than 20 new categories to the list of goods and services Guyanese have a better shot at providing.
