THE Houston, East Bank Demerara (EBD) area has been transformed over the past few years into a hub for stakeholders in the oil and gas sector, and, in order to ensure that potential investors can further establish their facilities there, the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) has started to redevelop the area.

Facilities, which cater for the oil and gas industry, have already been established at Houston by Guyana Shore Base Inc., Tiger Tanks and Schlumberger among others. With further developments expected, Chief Development Planner of CH&PA, Germene Stewart, said the authority will be looking to redevelop the area and make it available to stakeholders in the oil and gas sector.

“We have been proactive in meeting with developers and land owners…to date, for the oil and gas sector, we have processed 44 applications,” said Stewart in her remarks at the CH&PA’s end-of-year press conference, on Monday.

She said Guyana will experience development like never before, so the authority is preparing by redeveloping Houston as part of the Georgetown Development Master Plan for the oil and gas industry. Some 914 business applications were processed this year.
Guyana, with the advent of the oil and gas sector, has entered a new level and set to lead in global economic growth. Testimony to Guyana’s potential rise in the global arena was the rating from New York-based stock market, NASDAQ, which listed the South American country as the fastest growing economy in the world. According to NASDAQ, Guyana’s projected growth rate from 2018-2021 is 16.3 per cent.

The stock market said that with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) size of $3.63 billion (2018 Rank: 160), a growth rate of 4.1 per cent in 2018 and 4.6 per cent in 2019, Guyana’s economy is expected to grow by 33.5 per cent and 22.9 per cent in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

Those projections climbed in a report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which stated that Guyana’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to grow by approximately 86 per cent in 2020, almost twenty times more than the projected 4.4 per cent growth for this year.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has also forecast a staggeringly high growth rate for Guyana for next year. ECLAC noted that Guyana’s growth rate is pegged at 4.5 per cent for this year, while next year it will be 85.5 per cent.
A report from Bloomberg stated that with such figures, Guyana’s GDP will grow fourteen times as fast as China’s next year. Further projections by the IMF showed that real GDP will grow by 4.8 per cent in 2021, 20.6 per cent in 2022 and 26.2 per cent in 2023. Guyana’s $4 billion annual GDP is also expected to expand to about $15 billion by 2024, said the IMF. The financial institution said the commencement of oil production will substantially improve Guyana’s medium- and long-term outlook. Guyana is projected to be among the world’s largest per-capita oil producers by 2025.

The oil sector is projected to grow rapidly, accounting for around 40 per cent of GDP by 2024 and supporting additional fiscal spending annually of 6.5 per cent of non-oil GDP on average over the medium term, which will help meet critical social and infrastructure needs