…as Guyana prepares for First Oil, says Houston energy consultant
By Kristen Macklingam
As Guyana continues to prepare for a booming oil and gas industry, the government is being urged not to forget to develop its infrastructure.
Energy Consultant from the Callender Law Firm in Houston, Texas, Edwin Callender, underscored the importance of infrastructural planning during an Oil and Gas Business Training Conference on Thursday morning at the Pegasus Hotel, Georgetown.
He explained that in preparing Guyana for the oil and gas sector the entire country needs to be able to participate in infrastructural planning so as to ensure that catastrophes do not arise in the near future.
“You have to consider the environmental impacts and the power plants and hydro power. Of course everyone knows Guyana means land of many waters and so that should not be abandoned because it is a renewable source of energy and it is very clean.”
According to Callender, already there is too much congestion on the major roadways and this will only get worse if the government does not plan to address this from now.
“People coming down the East Bank, the East Coast, the traffic jams are really terrible. If you had additional industry put into this same general area because people live here what is going to happen? It would be really, really terrible…so a lot of thought has to be put into the industrial park, the pipelines where they are going to go, the liquid hydro-carbon storage, processing and handling facilities and where those are going to go.”
The Energy Consultant stated that another key factor that must not be overlooked is the development and the modernization of the national grid.
He pointed out that although focus is being placed on the benefits that it will reap from a booming oil and gas sector, the management and improvement of the grid is essential in stabilizing the advancements in the infrastructural development of the country.
“These are all the things that should be considered and need to be considered and dealt with in a consorted strategic way. A piecemeal approach to this business is not going to cut it. There has to be some kind of central strategic unit either in the government or chartered by the government that does that planning and of course comprised of Guyanese experts dealing with all of these matters.”
This two-day conference which commenced on Thursday morning is being hosted by the Callender Law Firm for the second time in two years. Plans are on-going to ensure that this oil and gas and energy business training conference is done on an annual basis.
Meanwhile, Guyana is now home to the world’s largest new deep-water oil discovery, with principle explorer ExxonMobil pushing for the development of the oil reserves and production scheduled to begin in 2020.
