Co-chair of the Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), Dr. Steve Manteaw, has warned that Ghana’s oil sector could suffer significantly if future governments do not succeed in drawing more investment.
He believes that, without increased investor interest, oil production could potentially end within the next 20 years.
“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 voiced concerns that the failure to initiate new projects might be partly due to the steady decrease 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 not developed policies capable of drawing investors into the oil and gas industry.
“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 observed that government has made little investment in the exploration of the commodity over the years.
This, he regretted send bad signals to investors seeking to invest in 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.