Guyana’s leading private port investor, Tristar Port, which has already invested more than $100m on infrastructure and plans a further $150m within two years, says chief executive Cristobal Schlaubitz told TOC Americas in Cartagena.
Guyana’s government budget is set to triple next year as oil production surges and oil revenues start to flow into government coffers, but the country’s ports remain almost entirely privately funded, Cristobal Schlaubitz, chief executive of Tristar Port, told TOC Americas in Cartagena.
“All the ports are basically private, and the investment has been done by private investors. The government has not really focused too much on the port sector, which seems so important in a country like Guyana,” Schlaubitz said.
Guyana’s oil production has grown from zero to close to a million barrels a day since ExxonMobil’s discovery, Schlaubitz said, and is expected to reach close to 1.5 million barrels a day next year, in a country with an estimated population of 900,000 in 2020. The country now has six floating production storage and offloading units, he said. “Exxon is talking potentially about 10 of those units by 2030,” Schlaubitz said. Total has started seismic work to reevaluate a block it signed with the government this year, Schlaubitz added, alongside growing investment in gold and bauxite mining.
Next year the government’s budget is expected to triple, Schlaubitz said, after Guyana paid back to Exxon a significant part of the company’s initial capital expenditure.
Tristar has had to build much of its own supply chain to construct its port on the Demerara River, Schlaubitz said. “We had to invest in barges so we could bring the sand and the gravel that we needed to construct the port… We’re now investing in our own dredge because the dredging capacity in the country is deficient,” he said.
The company has invested in excess of $100m to date, Schlaubitz said, and plans to invest at least another $150m over the next two years, including a shipyard and fabrication yard on additional land along the river.
On the shipping side, container lines serve Guyana mainly through feeder operators such as Caribbean Feeder, while Maersk, MSC and Hapag-Lloyd call via feeder services, Schlaubitz said. Break bulk operators including Intermarine, UAL and BBC also bring cargo into the country, alongside bulk vessels arriving from China.
Schlaubitz named human resources as the biggest challenge over the next two to three years. “We have a problem, not necessarily only on the skills of the people, but the number of people,” he said. “The country does not have enough people for the development that’s coming. You have oil companies, you have oil service companies, you have mining companies. Everybody is looking for employees, and there’s just not enough.”