Mr McIntosh, who doubles as director of Aberdeen City Council, told The Citizen yesterday that Tanzania needs to build its own supporting social service and economic infrastructure like roads, storage facilities, health centres and training institutions, among others, that will support the production and processing of natural gas.

 

Mr McIntosh's views come at a time when Tanzania has already discovered about 55 trillion cubic feet of natural gas which is commercially viable for multinational companies to construct a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant in the country.

 

"The tendency of depending on multinational companies in the development of such infrastructure is bad as it ruins the country's capacity to build local content in oil and gas," Mr McIntosh said. He said Tanzania's local content policy is good and may help the country if put into practice.

 

According to him, the Scottish people have been developing their own oil and gas infrastructure through partnerships between the public and private sectors.

 

"In Scotland, big companies such as Shell, BP and Total did not invest in infrastructure but they injected their capital for their own business benefits. They did not bring money for infrastructure development," said Mr McIntosh.

 

He also talked on the need to invest in education and training related to oil and gas activities for building local content. Figures, released by Mr McIntosh showed yesterday that with an annual income of 30 billion pound sterling (about Sh95trillion) from oil and gas, Aberdeen City has become a major oil and gas centre in the North Eastern side of Europe.

Source : allafrica.com