Guyana lacks oil & gas trained labour officers to send on board FPSOs – Labour Minister

– says PPP/C inherited crippled Labour Dept, capacity now being built

Despite the rapid growth of the oil and gas sector in Guyana and the discovery of oil since 2015, Guyana still lacks specialised Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) officers with the appropriate training to go offshore and examine Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessels or drillships.
This admission was made by Labour Minister Joseph Hamilton during a recent appearance on Globespan that focused on OSH and Guyana’s developing economy. According to Hamilton, the lack of capacity in Labour is because no oil and gas training was done for labour officers during the tenure of the former David Granger-led A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) Government.
“We are seeking to fix the structure. More importantly, at the level of both labour officers and occupational health and safety, there was no training done by the Granger regime, at the higher technical level, whereby these officers could properly supervise the oil and gas industry,” Hamilton explained.
“As I speak to you, we have no one who I can send to supervise these matters on those FPSOs or drillships. Because firstly, you have to know what you’re going to look for before you go to look. We are in the process of discussing with an international firm to train the OHS officers we have, to take them to a higher level so that they could be in a position to supervise the new officers that will be appointed.”
According to the Minister, they are also looking to have OHS officers who specialise in various sectors, such as in the oil and gas sector, mining, agriculture, construction and forestry. He noted that the aim is for these officers to themselves become trainers, not just for the Ministry of Labour but for other agencies – private or public sector.
Hamilton also noted that the Ministry of Labour was not only underskilled but also understaffed. To give an idea of how understaffed the Labour Ministry was, Hamilton revealed that the staffing structure when the PPP entered office required 120 staffers at the Ministry. But when they got into power, there were only 87 staff.
“I can say to the public, that we are going to be increasing the staffing at the Ministry of Labour. From 84 that I met, to nearly two hundred staffers. Because we have to create administrative departments that did not exist.”
ExxonMobil, whose affiliate Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) has dominated Guyana’s oil industry since being the first to discover oil in 2015, has so far made 19 oil discoveries offshore Guyana… the latest discovery being made at the Uaru-2 well in the Stabroek Block last month.
ExxonMobil has said it anticipates at least six projects offshore Guyana will be online by 2027. It is expected to submit a Field Development Plan (FDP) for one such project, Yellowtail, for governmental approval later this year.
The Stabroek Block is 6.6 million acres (26,800 square kilometres). EEPGL is operator and holds 45 per cent interest in the Stabroek Block. Hess Guyana Exploration Ltd holds 30 per cent interest and CNOOC Petroleum Guyana Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNOOC Limited, holds 25 per cent interest.
Already, ExxonMobil has established an ambitious oil exploration plan for 2021 offshore Guyana. Over the past few months, Exxon, the only company to have found and started producing oil in local waters, has been drilling simultaneous deepwater wells in both the Stabroek and Canje Blocks.
In March 2021, ExxonMobil secured a sixth drillship, the Noble Sam Croft, for exploration and evaluation drilling activities offshore Guyana. A fourth project, Yellowtail, has been identified within the block with an anticipated start-up in late 2025 pending Government approvals and project sanctioning. This project will develop the Yellowtail and Redtail fields, which are located about 19 miles (30 kilometres) southeast of the Liza developments.
Despite all these developments, however, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) entered office to find that just one oil and gas related legislation, the Natural Resources Fund Act, had been passed and even that will have to be reviewed.