Interview - Aberdeen Guyana Gateway, Sarah Hillyear, head of business development - RGU

I understand that you had the delegation at RGU this morning, could you tell us a little bit about what was involved and how that went?

Well we were delighted to welcome the delegation to the University which was organised through Granite PR. They came and we had a discussion with them about some of the opportunities in Guyana and then we shared a bit of information about what we've been doing in other countries that we thought might be relevant, where other companies are looking to develop the Oil and Gas sector and share some of our experiences.

Recently, you've had some involvement with Mexico I understand, so were you able to use that knowledge and transfer that to the Guyanese situation?

Exactly, so over the last couple of years we've been advising the Ministry of Energy and Mexico on their skills and needs now that they have opened up the market to international companies. Although Mexico's in a different situation it's been producing Oil for a long time and it's now basically becoming quite like Guyana, where it's a brand new market.

There's new players coming in and they are wanting to ensure that it gets much local content as possible so the government wanted to know how many skilled people would be required over the next 15 years and what exactly those skills would be and how they could support local people to ensure they had those skills How are RGU able to assist in determining what those skills are and kind of forecasting what the Guyanese requirement will be in the future and for those skill sets.

Presumably they have to have an education piece for the local workers as well to try and help them get up to speed to kind of global standards?

I think that's a very important point to ensure that local people are getting these opportunities so rather than the companies bringing in expats to operate and produce oil it's actually using the local skills.

So, our experience is we created a model where we are able to predict the number and types of skills that would be required over a period of time so looking at the country targets in regards to production levels local content etc and then using benchmark data to be able to determine the number intakes of people that would be required. Then what we did in Mexico was did a review of the current education system and then provided a number of recommendations on things he could do to looking at say higher education - developing specific degree programs for the Oil and Gas sector, same with the vocational side and also looking at sector leadership.

Having gone through that process you know what's your assessment of the Guyanese marketplace and what do you see as the major challenges?

We've not done anything for Guyana yet and today was the sort of initial discussion with them about whether that would be of interest and it certainly seemed to be from the delegations point of view but I think there's huge opportunities for Aberdeen and Guyana to work together and for us to share our lessons learned of how we've developed the North Sea and how they can learn from us for what they're developing their opportunities for Guyana.