OP-ED: Why does the Schlumberger facility have to be in a residential community?

Feb 10, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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 By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Undersea oil activity to some degree or the other, involves the use of hazardous material.  This means that onshore suppliers of oil companies operating offshore Guyana would be holding inventories of a very large quantities of likely hazardous materials.  Even from my layman’s eye, I don’t see how it could be otherwise.  The oil business is not of baking bread, using flour.  We know of complaints from areas about rice factories; the oil business is not of such either.  A friend had to close a small pig business that he had within community space.  These touch upon quality-of-life issues, with health concerns uppermost.  They are not overblown or without foundation; represent an array of human anxieties. With this as backdrop, I stare hard at Houston and Schlumberger.

I strongly believe that Houston residents are worried, with neither pretense nor ulterior motive at work.  Health, ambience, and values number among their main concerns.

So, why Schlumberger just must have its facility in Houston, home of people, families?  Why does this acknowledged hazardous business be in Houston, and not in an unpeopled location?  Why does any company, local or foreign, Schlumberger or other, believe and conclude that it has the legal, moral, and commercial right to establish such a business, facility, plant, structure, in an area inhabited by people?  Not whales, owls, or other endangered species?  I am concerned by what is interpreted to be this almost casual disregard for the risks and dangers to our fellow Guyanese.  I could have been them, can’t say what would have followed then.  Though distant from Houston, I am there in spirit, and any force that I can muster. Now I applaud Schlumberger’s signaled willingness to relocate from Houston.

We have considerable land space. The biggest issue is that Georgetown and environs were not designed for industrial sites, certainly not hazardous ones.  There are spaces in Essequibo and around the Berbice River -isolated and unpeopled.  Why not locate the hazardous facilities of companies with vendor relationships in Guyana’s booming oil sector in unoccupied spaces, like those?  Why try to retrofit, force-feed, Georgetown for what it was not designed?  Why ignore sprawling open spaces?

I appreciate why Schlumberger must have its facility in Houston, it is such a drop-dead issue for the company.  It involves money.  There is the nearness to the Demerara River, its long waterfront, and its convenient port(s) and wharves.  Transportation from wharf to Houston facility is quick, cheap, easy.  The logistical consideration of movement from port via roads would be costly, risky, slow and cumbersome, and compound the daily local road nightmare now the norm.

Security of radioactive material has to feature.  A truck could have an accident (or hijacked).  With global operators in Guyana nowadays, the fears are open-ended.  Matter could get into our air, or through backdoors to elsewhere.  Should I say America? Concerns should abound over a security breach for such sensitive materials in a residential neighbourhood.  I think some of this was experienced with Global Oil Environment Services, a waste plant in Coverden.

In Houston, I believe that the least cost, most convenient method, settled for is plunking down a facility with known hazardous elements.  Despite smooth public corporate chatter, companies decide on the ongoing risks and uninterrupted dangers of facilities like these in populated areas.  Thus, there is Houston today; with a Coverden before.  And there is the corporate confidence that Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency overseeing these developments will give the swiftest, smoothest, rubber-stamped clearances to whatever applications come for approvals.  Foreigners, buoyed by assurances from political and other actors, have the foresight that community concerns would be papered over, or overruled, by the EPA; objectors fading away; and Guyana’s courts favouring.  One courageous, principled Guyanese judge, Nareshwar Harnanan, didn’t.

It hurts for me to say that we do not have a functioning EPA at this most critical juncture, this formative stage, of our Oil Age.  It angers me to think that what Schlumberger first did in Houston, but was stopped by a Guyana Court, is now being persisted with before the EPA, and with the some of the same, if not most, of the component operational attributes untouched and intact.  I speak with specific reference to hazardous materials.

Because of this new development, I am left with no option but to table these questions, as piercing as they may be.  To begin with Schlumberger ever consider and continue with such a facility in Houston, Texas, as it fights to maintain in Houston, East Bank Demerara, Guyana?  Next, am I interpret this to mean that Guyanese lives are cheaper?  Then, that Guyanese (Houston area citizens) anxieties, fears, and concerns are of no consequence?  That is, because of the short thrift, the seemingly great disregard extended to them first, then their judicial institution?

Where is the PPP Government, its leaders, and its media endorsers on this?  Or are Houston residents mere collateral damage, the price of oil progress, Guyana’s dawning, booming civilization?  Go ahead, Schlumberger make good on that promise to relocate.  Not near populated areas, please.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• facility, GHK Lall, Hazardous, Health, Schlumberger

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