Drilling Oil: Unlike The Gambia, Ghana is for Real

Technical installations have started in Ghana's off-shore Jubilee Oilfields at Cape Three Points in the west of the country, as it looks forward to pumping the first barrel of oil and gas in the last quarter of this year. This is in remarkable difference to the claims of oil discovery made by President Jammeh in The Gambia in June 2004.

According to official reports in Accra, “Happy River " arrived in Ghana last week and is expected to build sub-sea structures for the installation of a billion-dollar Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel. The FPSO, the size of three football fields, is nearing completion in Singapore and it is expected to sail to the country in March this year, the report also says. It adds that the “Happy River,” fitted with cranes, arrived from Finland last Wednesday, and another vessel, the Olympic Triton, which is sailing from France, was expected in Ghanaian waters on Wednesday. Eight more vessels are expected in the country before and during the installation of the FPSO. Seventeen wells are already known to have been drilled, with each well containing millions of barrels of oil and gas.

The oilfields which will be developed in phases are expected to produce 120,000 barrels of crude per day. They have proven reserves of more than 300 million barrels of recoverable oil, making the discovery West Africa’s largest offshore deep-water discovery in over a decade. The Gambia’s mercurial president, Yahya Jammeh, over five years ago claimed discoveries comparable to that of Kuwait’s but few Gambians now believe in that hoax. 

The Ghana government has been saying it is putting in place the necessary measures to ensure that Ghanaians derived maximum benefit from the oil find.

The Jubilee Oilfields are jointly owned by Kosmos Energy, Tullow Oil Ghana Limited, the GNPC and the E.O Group, with Tullow Oil as the operator of the Jubilee Oilfields.

Partners in the oilfields will need to invest about US$5 billion to fully develop the fields to pave the way for the production of oil, the paper said, adding that due to the cost involved in drilling and the time frame needed for the acquisition of equipment, the partners will develop the discovered fields in phases.