…as National Hardware, TT company to operationalise joint venture

By Lisa Hamilton

A LOCAL company with regional ties is seeking to open its doors to increase opportunities for welders and fabricators here to utilise their services in Guyana’s offshore oil and gas sector.

The company will soon begin scouting local technical institutes for young graduates who will receive overseas training to meet the high standards of the industry. At GIPEX 2018, National Hardware Ltd Guyana entered a joint venture (JV) partnership with Trinidad’s Concepts and Services Company to form the Guyana Oil and Gas Support Services.

Senior Vice-President at National Hardware, Nicholas Boyer, updated the media that since then the new company has built a welding and fabrication facility in Georgetown which employs about 50 persons. It is the only company in Guyana with American Welding Society (AWS) certified welders which are capturing the attention of prime contractors.
A total of 10 welders have been sent to Trinidad recently to become certified and upskilled and 6 have been successful thus far.

They are now certified in various positions of 6G Welding which deals with positioning of pipes one to the other. This skill is challenging for a welder as a variety of body positions are needed to accomplish the weld, the most difficult of which is thought to be the overhead weld. “A number of the prime contractors have been interested in our development and some of them have been giving us jobs that help us in our growth and the growth of our welders,” Boyer said.

“For us, the future plans are huge, so we’re working on some additional joint ventures because what we want to do is grow the welding and fabrication space and we want to get more trained and certified welders and fabricators because, where we are right now, we’re just scratching the surface.”

Questioned on the types of opportunities available for welders in the local industry, Boyer explained that to fabricate the wellheads of the Liza 1 development requires massive yard space to fit together the equipment; something Guyana cannot facilitate. However, smaller, ancillary equipment which are needed for these large wellheads can be serviced by local welders and opportunities for the maintenance of equipment will capture a “heavy percentage” of the local market.

“It is smaller, it is stuff that could be transported,” he explained. “For instance, in the Gulf of Mexico, if you’re transporting by roads you have four-lane highways with wide width so they can carry the equipment easily and safely. If they’re building it waterside, you have key side depths that are 12 meters around so that you can load it on to large vessels. We don’t have any of this infrastructure. We need to build more of that infrastructure to get more of that work here.”

Until then, the support service company wants to see more of the manageable equipment going offshore to rigs and FPSOs being welded and fabricated in Guyana. It understands that to achieve this, great investment must be put into training and procuring additional equipment for welders to conduct the work. “It’s fun to see these Guyanese people who would have said [they] can’t participate in the industry [because] we’ve only done ‘this’ type of welding, to beat the expectations; to break the mold and be the first to say ‘look, we did it; we became certified, we can do this, we are ready to take on this industry’,” Boyer said.

Meanwhile, Damion Jordan of Concepts and Services, said that the JV company is also exploring the setting up of a Welders Training School to eliminate the need to travel to Trinidad. However, he explained that this will require equipment or test pieces and much local collaboration as the steel used in Guyana is less thick when compared to the ones required as standard for the oil industry. Boyer said that the more of these gaps that are closed that better chance Guyanese have to become upskilled and employable by oil companies. The welders are also being trained for Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE) and Confined Spaces.