Ghana is biggest of Tullow Oil’s 60% oil production in Africa

Ghana holds the biggest of Tullow’s  oil production in Africa as the continent is cited as the place to watch for the next global oil boom. 60% of Tullow Oil’s production comes from the continent.

The CEO of Tullow Oil says therefore, the future of the global oil industry lies in Africa.

Aidan Heavey told the Telegraph, a UK publication, “we love working in Africa. It’s where we see the major growth and where the future of the business will be. Africa is one of the great unexplored areas.”

The publication indicates that over the past year, Tullow has more than doubled its stock market value to £8.7bn, tripled its global workforce to 850, including 400 in the UK and climbed to 32nd in the FTSE 100 index.

All these developments it says is caused by African oil. With assets in 15 African nations from Mauritania to Madagascar, Tullow now gets 60% of its production from the continent. The rest is mostly North Sea gas, but Africa accounts for 94% of group reserves.

“But the phenomenal success that we have had in the last five years has been organic growth and Ghana has been the biggest part of that,” Heavey says.

Adding it is ground-breaking because the oil lies not in a river delta, as has previously been the case with west African discoveries, but in deep coastal waters where it is thought to owe its presence to continental shift.

That means, he says, that Jubilee’s properties could be repeated not only all the way up Africa’s west coast to Senegal but also across the Atlantic Ocean to Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana in South America, on the other side of the continental shift pattern.

Tullow Oil owns 38% in Ghana’s Jubilee oil field, reputed to be the largest to be discovered in West Africa in the last 10 to 15 years.  The other partners are US companies Kosmos Energy – 30% and Anadarko Petroleum, 22% and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) which has 10%.

According to Tullow Oil, the Jubilee oil field has about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and has 17 wells.

Commercial production in the field is expected to start in June 2010.

And Dr Kwabena Donkor, Ghana’s deputy Minister of Energy had said that under Phase One of the Jubilee Field project, 120,000 barrels of oil and 120,000 million standard cubic feet of dry gas per day would be produced in 2010.

Production would be increased to 240,000 barrels of oil and 240,000 million standard cubic feet of gas per day under the second phase of the Jubilee Field project which is expected to commence in 2013.

According to him, “the appraisals so far conducted indicate that the Jubilee Field contains expected recoverable reserves of about 800 million barrels of light crude, with an upside potential of about three billion barrels”.

Tullow Oil has a promising development in Uganda, where it reckons it has found a resource of 700m barrels and is in talks about selling part of the action to a production partner.

By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi