By Dr. Steve Manteaw, Co-chair of the Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), has warned that Ghana’s oil industry could face significant challenges if successive governments do not attract more investors.
He predicts that production might come to a halt within the next 20 years, specifically by 2024.
“We know we have been taking oil out of Jubilee for the last ten or 14 years now. The Jubilee lifespan was supposed to be 25 to 30 years, so if you have taken about 14 years then we have some few years ahead to exhaust the reserves”, he said after the launch of the GHEITI 2021/2022 report.
Dr. Manteaw expressed concern that the failure to launch new projects may be partly attributed to the ongoing decline in oil production over the past four years.
“If we do not add to the reserves, my fear is that in the next 15 or 20 years our oil production will be gone. Reason is that while we are peaking we are not bringing new projects on-stream”.
He noted that the government has failed to develop policies that would attract investors to the oil and gas sector.
“We are not inviting the investors. They are all moving to other neighbouring countries. Our seismic data is also poor. We have 2D instead of 3D”, he said.
Dr. Manteaw noted that the government has made minimal investments in commodity exploration over the years. He expressed regret that this sends negative signals to potential investors looking to enter the sector.
The GHEITI report
The report revealed that in 2021, the Jubilee field produced 27 million barrels of crude compared to a 2020 output of 30 million.
The Jubilee field contribute about half the total national output, even though production reduced slightly by 10 percent.
In 2022, the Jubilee field contributed half of the total output, showing a production increase of 11.5 percent from the 2021 output.
The highest monthly production volume on the Jubilee field was recorded in March and the lowest in May.
There was however a 33 and 28 percent in the Tweneboa Enyera Ntomme(TEN) fields in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
This was attributed to poor reservoir performance. However, production at the Gye Nyame Sankofa projects saw some improvement in 2020, but declined again in 2021, which was linked to the Emergency Shutdown.
Recommendations from the report indicated that the government should invest in data collection to help deal with the challenge facing the country’s oil field.
