The Berbice gas pipeline

Following a presentation by President Ali at the US-Guyana business exchange meeting in Houston, last week, Exxon Guyana’s CEO Alastair Routledge acknowledged that while a gas pipeline has already been landed at Vreed-en-Hoop to power the Wales Gas-to-Energy (GtE) industrial complex, “…the vision of His Excellency and the challenge he has set us on timeline is by the end of his presidency, we will have also the Berbice Region-supported gas flow and a whole new set of industries.”
This is certainly welcome news since while President Ali had been promoting the development of Berbice with the gas pipeline as an integral, threshold project, Exxon had been noncommittal by emphasising that the envisaged pipeline would cost at least US$2 billion and as such, there would have to be enough “anchor customers” committed to long-term demand for the gas to justify such a huge sunken cost. It would appear that they are now convinced. There had been the announcement by a private Guyanese Consortium of Muneshwers Ltd and John Fernandes Ltd – through their joint venture, Cranes Guyana Inc to establish a long-promised US$285 million port facility and a deepwater harbour at the mouth of the Berbice River. This would complement announced Government infrastructure upgrades such as a fixed high-span bridge across the Berbice River and road expansions along with two new state-of-the-art hospitals in New Amsterdam and Skeldon and expected agro-processing facilities.
But it was the announcement of the Government’s potentially transformative partnership Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed last November with US AI giant Cerebrus to establish a 100 megawatt (MW) data centre that evidently clinched the deal. Data centres certainly fit the energy demand criteria and the one proposed  by Cerebrus demand enough to power a small city. Cerebrus’ announcement was enthusiastic: “In a bold step toward shaping the future of technology in South America and the Caribbean, the Government of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana (Guyana) and Cerebras Systems have signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to build and operate a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) data centre of up to 100MW in Wales, Guyana. This transformative initiative marks a new chapter in Guyana’s journey to become an AI-first nation and the regional leader in digital innovation.”
The Cerebrus statement identified the Wales GtE location, but it now appears that their centre will actually be located in Berbice. Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras, revealed that, “This collaboration is a key cornerstone in our Cerebras for Nations initiative. Guyana is leading the way in this global programme in which we help world governments build, accelerate, and scale their sovereign AI initiatives.” Cerebrus is aggressively moving to carve out data centre market share from the early entrants and uses its proprietary flagship technology, the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) – the world’s largest and fastest AI processor wafer-chip, with each of them is equivalent to a supercomputer. At 56 times larger than the largest GPU, the WSE uses a fraction of the power per unit compute while delivering inference (output) and training more than 20 times faster than the competition.
Several challenges, however, will have to be overcome. In early April, ExxonMobil’s Routledge revealed the company had already submitted a field development plan for its Haimara/Longtail project and was targeting a 2030 startup, pending Government approvals expected by the end of this year. The Berbice pipeline would have to be supplied with gas from this 2030 project, which still leaves the pipeline to be laid.
Additionally, since Cerebrus will be using behind-the-meter electricity, they will need to establish the gas processing infrastructure and reliable power generation before they get going. And we know from our ongoing travails at Wales, this can be daunting. Then there is the need for extensive fibre connectivity for the data centre to deal with the inputs and outputs. Finally, modern AI data centres need electrical engineers, cybersecurity experts, cooling specialists, AI systems operators, cloud architects, telecom engineers. While Cerebras has promised training and sovereign AI development as part of the initiative, scaling talent fast enough will be challenging.