Government is continuing consultations with Trinidad’s ANSA McAL to select lands to plant sugarcane for a multi-million dollar ethanol project and the intermediate savannahs are also being looked at.
Originally, only the Canje Basin had been specifically mentioned by ANSA McAL in its statements here.
“ANSA McAL is here. We are presently engaged in selecting lands… we had a meeting this morning at the Ministry of Natural Resource and have narrowed down some of the issues… They started their feasibility study here and had some findings but [not] until it is complete would I be in a position to report on it,” Minister of Agriculture Dr. Leslie Ramsammy told Stabroek News yesterday. A feasibility study was to be done by ANSA on the Canje area and it is unclear if the findings Ramsammy referred to related to this.
“We have to find an area about 40,000 hectares. This project requires large scale cultivation of sugar cane. The only possibility is the intermediate savannahs or the Canje basin, so that would be where the interest is. [The] Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resource and ANSA are currently negotiating the location of land for that purpose,” Ramsammy added.
The Agriculture Minister stated that given that the proposed areas are forested, checks have to be made to verify that none of the country’s laws are broken as it relates to the use of forested areas.
“The areas located are forested and we have to see what can be done in those areas and if we will infringe on anything in the forestry rules… because part of the deal is that we are not going to destroy the forests and all agreements have to be guided by what is best for the country and environment and not just money,” he said.
The Guyana-Norway agreement on forests speaks to keeping deforestation at agreed minimum levels.
In February of this year, a team of ANSA McAL executives travelled to Guyana to clear the air on claims that that the company had signed a secret deal with government to establish an ethanol plant. Their visit had come in the wake of controversy surrounding a disclosure of a bilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in September last year by the Government of Guyana (GoG) and the company. News of the signing only came to Guyana’s attention through an article published in the Trinidad Guardian the week before their visit. The GoG has denied that the bio-fuel MoU signed with ANSA McAL was “secret” and said that the Trinidadian conglomerate was selected after its proposal was scrutinised by technical experts in the field of bio-energy.
The company’s executives had explained that ANSA should not be blamed for the late disclosure of the MOU to Guyanese and attributed the delay in information to government probably being preoccupied with the pending general elections along with its own focus on other projects.
ANSA McAL hoped then that given a favourable feasibility study in the Canje Basin focused on risks involved in areas of land, soil-type, land-preparation, sugarcane variety, transportation, choice of plant technology, potential revenues and labour costs, it would be able to pump some USD$250-300M into the ethanol plant project here.
The company is seeking to produce 40 million gallons of ethanol from two million tons of sugarcane, with 152 million liters (nameplate capacity) of ethanol annually.
Guyana was selected for the exploration of the investment because of its stable currency, its experience in the cultivation of sugar cane—the crop that would most probably be used to produce ethanol—and ANSA McAL’s business record here.
