A partnership sealed this year between National Hardware Guyana Limited and the Trinidadian firm Concepts and Services Company Limited (CSCL), an oil and gas support company, is an example of what local content capacity building should be, President of the Georgetown Chamber and Commerce and partner in the company Nicholas Deygoo-Boyer says.
“It is an example where Guyana and Trinidad work well together; I am relying on their oil and gas experience and them the financing and support [we] provide. We are definitely working together,” Deygoo-Boyer told Sunday Stabroek in an interview.
“Everybody is earning and learning from creating value. We have won work here based on competency. The work we won would not have come here, it would have gone to Trinidad,” he added.
National Hardware Guyana Limited and Concepts and Services Company Limited have partnered and formed the Guyana Oil and Gas Support Services Incorporated Inc. to provide support to the growing demand for infrastructure development and engineering services within the country.
But Deygoo-Boyer said that the focus has and will always be on building local content capacity so that persons here could directly work in the sector. “We feel that a local content policy is an important step forward for all Guyanese enterprises who want to be part of the oil and gas sector,” he said.
Located at Lot 17 – 19 Water Street, Georgetown, the company, according to Deygoo-Boyer, provides certified oil and gas standard welding and fabrication services. With help from CSCL, which Deygoo-Boyer says is a leading engineering, project management and technical services company that provides dedicated and focused services in the Caribbean and some non-CARICOM countries, the company is now able to bid for contracts in the oil and gas sector.
While the two companies entered into a formal partnership only last year, Deygoo-Boyer said that he and local partners spent the entire 2017 researching ways it could tap into the oil and gas sector and who are credible foreign partners that would push local content. “We decided to go into oil and gas because our partners, [CSCL] were in oil and gas and were looking for Guyanese partners to expand their footprint. In addition to that, in my network across the world, a number of people were discussing the Liza-1 find and were excited about the prospects for Guyana,” he explained.
“So we spent 2018 and did market research to understand what was needed. They bring the technical knowledge we didn’t have and we are working to build that,” he said.
Locals here were hired and the company invested in sending them for training in Trinidad, after which they were accredited by the American Welding Society (AWS).
Underscoring the lessons learned in safety though the partnership, Deygoo-Boyer noted the importance of international certification and standards, especially in the fields of health, safety, security and the environment, which are incredibly important in the oil and gas sector.
That overall knowledge, he believes, is already bearing fruit as currently the company has secured contracts in the welding, fabrication and construction sectors.
“We intend to go deeper into these sectors as we have barely scratched the surface on the opportunity in them. In addition, we also intend to look at repairs and maintenance work on facilities as well as industrial product sales. To accomplish all of this, we need continued investment, expansion of facilities and workforce,” he said of future plans.
The company currently has 14 welders who were trained and certified according AWS standards. But with increasing work to come as the oil and gas sector develops, Deygoo-Boyer sees the potential of employing many other local staff.
”We have received some contracts so far and are executing those contracts. Our clients have been bent on increasing local content and have worked with us to push more of the work to be done here in Guyana. Exxon is the ultimate client but we have done work for SAIPEM and did some small work for Technip FMC,” he related.
“The laboratory for Schlumberger’s Houston office we designed and built that, our local labour, although we were guided by the company. We have that skill here,” he added.
He also stressed that the jobs were won went through a bidding process facilitated by the Centre for Local Business Development, while also noting that he entered into the partnership before being elected as the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry President. “I declared upfront that I have this company and the work is not given to be because of my position. We get work because of our technical competency,” he said.
