To provide support to oil and gas operators here, Houston, Texas-headquartered subsea engineering and applied technology firm Oceaneering has established an office in Guyana.
The company, which expects that its Georgetown office will be operational by the end of the next two months, already has employed 18 locals and has dispatched them to various regions across the world for training.
Oceaneering, which was established 50 years ago in Morgan City, Louisiana, USA, has regional offices in multiple states in the USA and in the United Kingdom, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, India, Malaysia and Angola.
Andre Peretto, the firm’s Country Manager for Guyana, told this newspaper that the company is contracted by ExxonMobil and currently works on three of the four drill rigs in the offshore Stabroek Block.
“Currently here in Guyana we are working on three of the four drill rigs that are currently in country, providing ROV (remotely operated vehicle) services, survey services…and IWOCS (Intervention Workover Control Systems). To date, we have hired several Guyanese nationals and we are training them at our facility in Morgan City to become ROV pilots offshore. Eventually, we will increase that into survey engineers and from there we expand even further, once we have our office here in the next week or two,” Peretto said.
“We will hopefully get more involved with the future production, maintain our drilling footprint here, but then move from drilling into installations for umbilicals in field, doing the connection points subsea to produce oil back to the FPSOs…and then we also offer other services,” he added.
And while the company is hoping to offer other services in the future, for now it will focus on only certain areas. “We think our footprint here in Guyana will grow greatly in the coming years but right now we are just geared to the drilling side of the business,” he said.
The company’s General Manager is former Ramps Logistics Director Natasha Jairam-Abai, who said the company anticipates that “within the next month or two, everything should be set up for the office.”
“We have a total of 17 person plus myself, so that makes us 18 in total,” she said, while Peretto added “Our contract is with Exxon but hopefully we will be working for Tullow, Hess… in the future and any major operator that comes into Guyana, we would hope that we are working for as well.”
And as it plans for the future, the company has employed more persons that it currently needs but Peretto said that it doesn’t mind as those persons will be trained and sent to get on the job exposure at its offices across the world.
“We have more Guyanese employees than we actually could use we so are actually using them to work in other regions of the world. We are not just putting in the work here… We are giving them training so they can work anywhere in the world and not just here, which I think is great for them,” he said.
