Al­though Guyana is sched­uled to start con­struc­tion of its own re­fin­ery this year, its Nat­ur­al Re­sources Min­is­ter Vick­ram Bhar­rat says they are not "com­plete­ly clos­ing the door" on a pos­si­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion with T&T about re­fin­ing crude oil in this coun­try.

"We would have is­sued a Re­quest for Pro­pos­al for a de­sign, fi­nance build mod­el for a 30,000 bar­rel re­fin­ery in Guyana that would have been closed in De­cem­ber, we have nine sub­mis­sions to date so we are in the process of now eval­u­at­ing those nine pro­pos­als to move to a fi­nal se­lec­tion for one com­pa­ny," Bhar­rat told Guardian Me­dia dur­ing an in­ter­view at the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy con­fer­ence be­ing held at the Guyana Mar­riott ho­tel in George­town.

The pro­posed site for the re­fin­ery is 30 acres of land lo­cat­ed at the mouth of the Berbice Riv­er in the vicin­i­ty of an area known as “Crab Is­land.”

Con­struc­tion of the re­fin­ery is ex­pect­ed to start be­fore June and com­plet­ed with­in two years.

The com­pa­ny that wins the con­tract for the re­fin­ery's con­struc­tion will get a ten-year tax hol­i­day.

The project will be strict­ly fi­nanced and owned 100 per cent by the pri­vate sec­tor, and Guyana's gov­ern­ment will not have any own­er­ship or in­vest­ment in­ter­est in the project.

"But in men­tion­ing that I am not say­ing that the door is closed to talks with Trinidad in the fu­ture so I don't want to com­plete­ly close the door and say that we are not in­ter­est­ed at all in col­lab­o­rat­ing with Trinidad in any way or the oth­er with re­gards to re­fin­ing our crude there," Bhar­rat said.

Bhar­rat said this is all part of Guyana's plan in be­com­ing self-suf­fi­cient in terms of en­er­gy.

"We need to en­sure we have some form of en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty lo­cal­ly and that is why we are mov­ing ahead with the re­quest for pro­pos­als for the re­fin­ery and we have those nine sub­mis­sions that we are eval­u­at­ing," he said.

Last year T&T and Guyana signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing to co­op­er­ate in sev­er­al ar­eas in­clud­ing pur­su­ing en­hanced co­op­er­a­tion in en­er­gy.

As such Bhar­rat said a work­ing group will be es­tab­lished.

"What we will do and what is a re­quire­ment or a part of the MOU is for us to set up a work­ing group which we had be­fore so we are work­ing to­ward re-es­tab­lish­ing the work­ing group as part of the MOU," he said.

Bhar­rat said the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the two coun­tries is strong.

"I must say with Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley's pres­ence in Guyana at the en­er­gy con­fer­ence here and with Min­is­ter's Young pres­ence here it sends a clear mes­sage that Guyana and T&T are work­ing to­geth­er and there is a lot quite hon­est­ly that we can learn from T&T be­cause Trinidad has been in this sec­tor for decades now, we are new in it we are now pro­duc­ing so there is a lot that we can learn from each oth­er as well too," he said.

"And our heads of gov­ern­ment have a good work­ing re­la­tion­ship which we are build­ing on so I would say there are a num­ber of ar­eas that we can col­lab­o­rate and co­op­er­ate on and we have seen a strength­en­ing of our re­la­tion­ship, es­pe­cial­ly in the en­er­gy sec­tor of re­cent," Bhar­rat said.

Speak­ing at the en­er­gy con­fer­ence yes­ter­day Guyana's Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dr Ash­ni Singh said while the en­er­gy sec­tor has helped the coun­try's econ­o­my triple in size in the last three years, they are al­so en­sur­ing that the non-en­er­gy sec­tors are al­so de­vel­oped.

"The world is not short of ex­am­ples of ju­ris­dic­tions that have fall­en in­to the well-known cir­cum­stances of over-de­pen­dence on a par­tic­u­lar eco­nom­ic sec­tor and so we place the high­est lev­el of im­por­tance on en­sur­ing that we achieve strong non-oil eco­nom­ic growth and that we do the things nec­es­sary to­day to con­tin­ue to have strong non-oil eco­nom­ic growth go­ing for­ward," Singh said.

Singh said Guyana is mak­ing moves to en­sure it will nev­er go back to its pre­vi­ous eco­nom­ic po­si­tion.