Govt examining new structure for GEA

– implementing policies to boost capacity, safeguard resources

– Vice President

Vice President, Hon. Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, says the Government is working on a new structure for the Guyana Energy Agency (GEA) to ensure that it is better equipped to handle the rapid developments in the oil and gas sector.

During his guest appearance on GlobeSpan 24x 7’s ‘Oil & Gas Contracts and Opportunities for All Guyanese’ programme Wednesday evening, Dr. Jagdeo said the Coalition Government failed to implement policies to deal with the rapid changes occurring in the sector.

As such, the Government is working to safeguard the country’s resources.  

The administration is working to amend the 1986 Petroleum Exploration Production Act and to implement policy framework, while simultaneously ensuring investments in the sector are not delayed.

“Every day there are mundane issues, real-time issues that you have to address, which takes a lot of the technical staff’s time because if they don’t fix the permit now, we lose investments, et cetera, people lose money, et cetera.

So, it’s a big struggle between the two and the only way we resolve that is by building the capacity,” he said.

The Vice President said advertisements to build the human capacity can be expected as early as next week.

“So, even now, we’re working on the new structure for the Energy Agency that will manage the sector. We will have to recruit people in aggressively from next week, hopefully you’ll start seeing maybe six ads in the newspapers so we can start managing the sector better,” he said.

Dr. Jagdeo explained that the new policies will empower the Government by ensuring that it can hold oil companies accountable for the sums spent here, to avoid Guyana paying exorbitant cost recovery fees.

Touching on the issue of renewable energy and the environmental impact of oil production, Dr. Jagdeo noted that the Government is cognisant that the window for the production and utilisation of fossil fuels is “rapidly closing.” As such, “this resource has to be utilised in a careful way, but swiftly.”

The Vice President also said with the right policies in place, Guyana can maintain its “green” status while it produces oil.

“I believe we can still keep our green credentials. We can expand the Low Carbon Development Strategy, which we plan to do into the ‘blue’ economy, into biodiversity issues, water management, sale of ecosystem services. We can keep our green credentials intact and still produce oil and gas,” he said.

The World Bank defines the ‘blue’ economy as one in which the ocean’s resources are exploited sustainably for economic growth and improved livelihoods.

Dr. Jagdeo noted that the United States Administration’s commitment to the Paris Agreement to incentivise production of renewable resources will see private sector investment for non-polluting forms of energy coming in on an accelerated scale. The Vice President emphasised that the resources garnered from the petroleum sector must be used to uplift the standard of living for all Guyanese by reinvesting in other sectors.