The Co-chair of the Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative has revealed that Ghana’s oil fields are peaking, leading to a decline in crude oil production.
Dr Steve Manteaw told Evans Mensah, host of Joy News’ PM Express, on Wednesday that “the last time I checked, we have produced half of Jubilee Fields, a third of TEN, and about a tenth of Sankofa Gye Nyame.”
He cautioned, “So if we don’t add to our reserves, in a matter of 10 to 15 years, we will have no oil industry.”
This follows a PIAC report indicating that crude oil production in Ghana declined for the fourth consecutive year in 2023.
Experts say drastic measures must be explored to deal with the matter.
Dr Manteaw said despite the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC)’s efforts to attract investors, nothing substantial has materialised.
“Sometimes I feel we are even throwing money down the drain. The investments are not coming for obvious reasons; we had EXXON Mobil exit our oil industry, and their reason was the prices of our blocks and the quantum of finds they made.
“If we had bigger blocks, then they have a better prospect of finding oil in the right quantities that will get them value for money.
“The other reason, which we infer from our last bidding round, has to do with the data quality…we do not have adequate data in the right quality to be able to attract investors,” he said.
Technical Manager of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), Mark Agyemang, has revealed that they have been warning of a decline in crude oil production since 2018.
According to him, operational issues and regulatory and governance challenges have led to a drastic decline in oil production.