Introduction
My Sunday column last week [February 2] ended a rather long-running discourse that was devoted in the main, towards macroeconomic management, fiscal reform and monetary policy in Guyana along with, inescapably, the management of its exchange rate system when it was already fabled, as a rapidly emerging Petrostate; indeed, termed by many [including the IMF] as the world’s fastest growing [GDP] Petrostate ever.
As it has turned out that February 2 column not only marked 1] the ending of my first multi -column exploration of any depth] focusing on Guyana’s macroeconomic challenges as a Petrostate and 2] also appeared as a publication two weeks after the delivery of Guyana’ s National Budget 2025 to the National Assembly.
Perhaps paradoxically, as fate would have it the focus of that summing-up column, which appeared last week was devoted to the avoidance of the dreaded Dutch Disease and the much-feared Resource Curse, both of which might soon be threatening Guyana’s macroeconomic policy as the pressures of political blending of the 2025 National Budget and the expected National Elections compound each other Readers are generally aware that, as a practice, I usually devote several of each’s year’s Sunday columns to the discussion of each year’s National Budget. Considering that holding national elections is scheduled for later this year that tradition will continue this year for sure. Over the next several weeks as these debates continue to pick up I’ll offer readers a summary statement on the portrayal of key global trends in the offshore upstream oil and gas production sector, in which Guyana operates.
Framing global trends
What do I refer to as global trends? The ordinary meaning speaks to the situation in which worldwide many countries reflect tendencies that suggest common directions, patterns of development, leading toward identifiable outcomes. For purposes of this limited column series I shall be treating the term global trends as including, what is also commonly referred to as megatrends.
In other words the difference revealed in practice in the treatment between trends and megatrends is not material Further, in my assessment of the literature on this subject I have been struck by the wide range, variety and large number of their themes, as well as the admixture of sheer complexity and sublime simplicity of the global trends that have been identified to date. Taken as a whole the above places lots of pressure on my judgement about which trends to select for this assessment.
Existing restraints and opportunities
Let me start my portrayal of the global trends by briefly drawing readers’ attention to a couple of leading features that distinguish the present state of play in the offshore upstream oil and gas market. I have labelled the two features as 1] a restraint and 2] an opportunity.
In regard to the first listed feature, a restraint, several end-2024 future Offshore Oil and Gas Market Reports advise that, 1] appreciating operational costs in offshore extraction could well limit investment returns 2] the effective dependence on deep-water drilling, in particular, requires substantial financial investment for exploration and production activities. The high costs of such operations and the volatile nature of oil prices, make profitability a significant challenge for companies in this sector.
Clearly therefore emerging opportunities offshore will depend heavily on expanding options leading to surging investments in offshore exploration development and construction activities.
12 Reported Leading Mega-trends
In this Section I refer to an empirically based attempt to provide a basis for identifying global trends. I refer to Start-Up-insights, which has reported on its efforts to identify the leading mega-trends it identified for the period 2025 to 2030.
Their methodology required four major steps namely,
First, they stated that over a hundred industry reports were analyzed so as to ascertain recent innovations in order to gather relevant insights.
Second, the information obtained was cross- checked with external sources to ensure its accuracy.
Third, the firm reported that it leveraged the StartUs Insights Discovery Platform[ an AI- and Big Data-powered Innovation Intelligence Platform covering 4.7M+ emerging companies and over 20K+ trends & technologies worldwide] to:
Fourth, A] Confirm our findings using the Trend Analysis feature and
B] Find emerging tech companies for the “Spotlighting an Innovator” sector.
Conclusion
Due to space constraints I’ll report next week on the details of the 12 listed megatrends by Start Us Insights for the period 2025 to2030. Here I conclude with a recent observation concerning opportunities for which end 2024 marketing reports suggest that the offshore upstream exploration and development market is revving up as the demand for energy supplies continues to press demand for new oil and gas supplies. Construction activities are underway for a number of new floating production platform systems including semisubmersibles, FPSOs, spars, and other floating production systems
To quote Offshore Atlantic, SLB,. “Over the years, we have diligently provided ,,, complex Deepwater environments and advanced technology solutions; contracts include digital directional drilling services and hardware, logging while drilling (LWD), surface logging, cementing, drilling and completions fluids, completions, and wireline services”.
Next week I address the 12 mega-trends listed by StartUs Insights.
