By NAN Business Editor
News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Fri. Nov. 11, 2022: An American-owned energy company has been selected to forge ahead with negotiations to build an almost US$1 billion natural gas-fired electricity plant and natural gas liquids plant in the oil rich CARICOM South American nation of Guyana.
President Irfaan Ali on Thursday made the disclosure that Houston-based LINDSAYCA, in a joint venture with CH4 Guyana, has been selected to forge ahead with negotiations to build the natural gas-fired electricity plant and natural gas liquids plant at Wales, West Bank Demerara.
He said in a video statement on Facebook that Cabinet on Thursday also decided to rank PowerChina as number two for negotiations should talks fall through with CH4/LINDSAYCA.
LINDSAYCA, on its website, says it was founded in 1995 through private equity and family ownership and has rapidly expanded initially in Venezuela, providing services to both state- and privately-owned clients in the upstream and downstream energy sector. It’s key principal is listed as Hector Jose Fuentes according to Dunn and Bradstreet with 1,000 employees.
CH4 Guyana is actually part of the Puerto Rico based CH4 Group, an engineering, procurement and construction, project management, operation and maintenance company, with extensive experience in the areas of the electricity, oil, gas, petrochemical, mining and infrastructure sectors. The company has also set up an arm in Suriname, the other newly oil rich CARICOM nation in South America and Guyana’s neighbor.
CH4 Guyana-LINDSAYCA has said it could build the two plants for US$899 million while PowerChina has put a price tag of US$704 million.
The Guyana government hopes to ink a deal with CH4/ LINDSAYCA before the end of this month, with the aim of completing construction of the electricity plant by December 2024.
Supervising the construction of the Guyana government-owned plants would be Engineers India Ltd. Bids would later be invited for a world class company to operate the facility.
Regardless of which company is picked, the plants would be constructed under an Engineering Procurement Construction contract, the President said.
The US government has provided a US$2 billion line of credit for American companies to do business in Guyana.
The Guyana government projects that Guyanese households and businesses would pay 5 US cents per kilowatt hour for electricity instead of the current estimate of 13 US cents. Currently, the Guyana government is subsidizing electricity tariffs due to the steep increase in fuels being used for electricity generation, due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
