Passing petroleum bill won’t affect contract with oil companies – Energy Advisor

There are various petroleum bills before Ghana’s Parliament, but when these bills are passed into laws, they would not change anything in the contract that the country already has with the oil companies producing oil in Ghana.

An energy advisor to the Ghana government Tony Paul has told journalists from Ghana and Uganda at a training workshop in Accra that even if the current law is repealed and new laws come into force, these will not affect the way Tullow Oil or Kosmos Energy does business with Ghana because these companies, have a “ring fenced contract” with the government and contracts can only be renegotiated when the other party agrees.

Meanwhile, the agreements that Ghana has signed with the oil companies remain mostly unknown because the parties are under obligation to keep them confidential.

It is therefore, unclear to whose greater interests those agreements serve.  There is also conflicting information as to what percentage Ghana owns in the oil that is now being produced in the country’s largest field – the Jubilee oil field.

The field is said to be the largest oil field in West Africa containing 1.5 billion barrels of oil.

On local content, Mr. Paul observed that even the Ghana government has acknowledged that its objective of attaining 90% Ghanaian ownership in the oil industry by 2020 is not realistic.

According to him, in looking at local content, Ghana must target areas that are strategic to its interest.

By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi