The University of Guyana (UG) has begun accelerating its capacity building efforts in order to ensure adequate tertiary training is available in light of Guyana’s emerging oil & gas industry.
As such, UG has in recent weeks and months been actively seeking international partners—a venture that will in a matter of weeks lead to tangible relationships being forged with two Regional Universities from neighbouring oil producing sister CARICOM country, Trinidad and Tobago.
UG Vice Chancellor, Ivelaw Griffith, made the disclosure on Wednesday last when the University wrapped up its Professorial Lectures for 2017—a foray that dealt with “The Fear Factor: Race, Oil and Reforming Guyana.’
Griffith was at the time responding to members of the public that took up the invitation to attend the Professorial Lecture, delivered by Deputy Vice Chancellor, Paloma Mohamed Martin.
Speaking to the University’s preparation for the development of an Oil and Gas industry, Vice Chancellor Griffith told those in attendance at the Education Lecture Theatre at the Turkeyen Campus, “we’ve begun to reach out…there was a team that went to Canada, building a partnership with a University there that has long experience in the energy… (we have been) reaching out to a South African University with long experience in energy.”
PETROLEUM PARTNERSHIP
Speaking to the imminent petroleum partnership with neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago,
Griffith reported, “we’re going to be having an opportunity for a return visit to Trinidad in January, and that opportunity will allow us to make some connections in a very tangible way with both of the Universities with which we made connections when we went to Trinidad.”
He was speaking of the University of Trinidad and Tobago and University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus.
The Vice Chancellor in charge of Guyana’s highest institution of learning had reported that, “I led a team a couple of weeks ago to Trinidad and Tobago, reaching out…how can we partner? How can we have lessons in your experiences learned so that we don’t repeat them here?”
He reported too that UG has since also contracted two consultants “that have a wealth of experience not only on the academic side but the industry side.”
The University’s Vice Chancellor was firm in his conviction, “the reality is that we have found ourselves in a wonderful space with possibilities on the horizon.”
US oil major ExxonMobil and joint venture partners Hess and CNOOC Nexen will begin oil production in Guyana in 2020.
