Guyana-based ANSA McAL Trad­ing Ltd has signed a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing (MoU) with the Guyana gov­ern­ment for the es­tab­lish­ment of an ethanol pro­duc­tion project. The MoU was signed by An­tho­ny N Sab­ga III, busi­ness de­vel­op­ment ex­ec­u­tive, ANSA McAL Group, Dr Roger Lun­cheon, head of the pres­i­den­tial sec­re­tari­at and Desmond Mo­hamed, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer (for­mer), Guyana Of­fice for In­vest­ment.

It was wit­nessed by Robert M Per­saud, for­mer Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture, Aneal Ma­haraj, Group fi­nance di­rec­tor, ANSA McAL and Bev­er­ley Harp­er, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor ANSA McAL Trad­ing Guyana. The agree­ment was signed on Sep­tem­ber 30, 2011. In a state­ment, ANSA McAL said that both par­ties were cur­rent­ly con­duct­ing an in-depth fea­si­bil­i­ty study, which in­cludes in­fra­struc­ture and de­vel­op­ment works; plant and equip­ment and rolling stock.

This ethanol plant is pro­ject­ed to have a ca­pac­i­ty to process up to 2,000,000 tons of sug­ar­cane per year and pro­duce up to 40 mil­lion gal­lons (name­plate ca­pac­i­ty) of ethanol per year. This agro-en­er­gy in­dus­tri­al project will be built on 110,000 hectares of vir­gin land, ac­cord­ing to the state­ment. As a strat­e­gy for eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment, the Guyana gov­ern­ment has adopt­ed a pol­i­cy to fos­ter the de­vel­op­ment of eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ties in the coun­try in an ef­fi­cient, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly safe and sus­tain­able man­ner.

"As a re­sult, the gov­ern­ment of Guyana and a sub­sidiary of the ANSA McAL Group, a re­gion­al con­glom­er­ate, have agreed to part­ner to es­tab­lish a world-scale bio­fu­el project. "The pro­posed ethanol project will be well po­si­tioned to suc­cess­ful­ly be­come a low-cost, glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive provider of ethanol to in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al mar­kets," read the state­ment. The state­ment said it is ex­pect­ed that through the syn­er­gies be­tween the Guyana gov­ern­ment and ANSA McAL the peo­ple of Guyana will ben­e­fit through:

• Gen­er­a­tion of en­tre­pre­neur­ial ser­vice in­dus­tries, re­sul­tant em­ploy­ment and wealth cre­ation for na­tion­als of Guyana

• Op­por­tu­ni­ty for Guyana to be­come the re­gion­al leader in the de­vel­op­ment of re­gion­al poli­cies, stan­dards and frame­works for util­i­sa­tion of al­ter­na­tive fu­els, with the po­ten­tial of re­duc­ing the re­gion's de­pen­dence on fos­sil fu­els