YOUR kind permission to respond to Mr. Tony Vieira’s latest missive in the Stabroek News (12 January, 2012) is again sought. 

Whilst it is tiring to keep reminding your readers of simple points already articulated, I respond to ensure that technical solutions do not acquire political baggage or encumbrances due to anyone’s need to posture or save face. It is my hope that the effort to reiterate myself helps make pellucid the justification for this technology to be employed.
Briquetting technology is certainly not new, and IAST has never claimed that it is – but it has never been used in Guyana. It took us two demonstrations to convince GuySuCo to utilise this “old” technology. This “old” technology is still not utilised to consume the waste wood and rice hulls that abound in Guyana. I am loathe to contemplate how long it would take to convince Mr. Vieira, the general public and existing companies to utilise truly “new” technologies and approaches, if the application of this “old” technology presents such significant hurdles and creates as much entropy in the letter columns of the dailies. Simply because some technology exists, Editor, does not mean that it is facile to employ them in Guyana. Think of the multitude of technologies that are used elsewhere and are not employed here and one begins to appreciate that there are many hurdles – cultural, capital availability, energy costs, policy, taxation, availability of highly qualified personnel, etc., and perhaps most importantly – the absolute conviction by some that anything done here cannot work and should attract the most vitriolic of criticism on that basis.

My job does not entail functioning as a tour guide for Mr. Vieira, so I shall not be accompanying him anywhere. I am making a factual statement here: Mr. Vieira is wrong to say that excess bagasse do not exist at some sugar estates. I will not allow him to make this statement without comment as he is mis-informed and mis-leading and I have the photographic and video proof of this – but since Mr. Vieira seems to want to comment rather than verifying his facts, then I encourage the newspapers to take a picture of the giant pile of unused, waste bagasse that exists at Albion estate. It is strange that without availing himself of any of the reports we freely offered to share, or the details of the financial plan, and on the basis of his erroneous assumption that there is no excess bagasse, Mr. Vieira feels it is acceptable to criticise.

I have agreed with his assertion that GuySuCo does not produce enough cane, and that with an adequate production, it would not need firewood (and therefore briquettes) to power its furnaces. But I have also pointed out that if briquetting is used now to alleviate the obvious issues with cane supply, leading to savings in operational costs to purchase firewood, that it can then be used to co-generate electricity when GuySuCo hopefully addresses its cane supply problem. This clearly would increase its revenues.

Mr. Vieira is also dis-ingenious when he claims that it will take a capital investment of Gy$50M to establish the briquetting plant, when I clearly pointed out that the capital investment is less than US$100,000, which at today’s exchange rates amounts to Gy$21M.
Interesting, since Mr. Vieira in the same letter complains that the IAST saves Guyana $35M annually in fuel costs by converting waste oil into biodiesel. Strange logic – to criticise a process which saves $35M annually in costs, but create a mountain out of a molehill to criticise a $21M investment which GuySuCo’s business plan suggests will generate multiple tens of millions in savings.
Editor, I am completely frustrated that every time someone puts forward a potential technical solution in Guyana, it is first met with derision and then with made-up facts. Employment of any process attracts risks. I am certainly open to discussion of risk management on points that we have not considered. But I grow weary of our national pastime of criticising all and sundry from the comfort of our soapboxes.
I cannot tell your readers when and how efficiently GuySuCo will employ this technical solution. That is up to GuySuCo, and it is not within my jurisdiction to dictate that schedule. I have done my job – presented a detailed technological solution and demonstrated its suitability to the problem at hand.

PROFESSOR SURESH S. NARINE,
Director, IAST