Ghana-Ivory Coast border dispute doesn’t distract us – Kosmos Energy
Kosmos Energy says it is not distracted by the raging maritime border dispute between Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, as it continues to develop some of its oil blocks in the disputed area.
The company said once the International Criminal Court (ICC) had not restrained Ghana and the oil exploration and production companies from working around the area.
The Communications Manager of Kosmos Ghana, Mrs Ruth Adashie, made these remarks in an interaction with some journalists in Accra.
Her interaction formed part of an oil, gas and mining (OGM) training programme for selected journalists in Ghana. The programme was an initiative of the Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), with Penplusbytes, an information and communications technology (ICT) journalism training institution, as the local partner.
Mrs Adashie said the dispute “has not affected our work at all,” adding if it had “we would have laid down our tools and waited to see what the government would say but that is not the case.”
She explained that once the ICC had not put an injunction on Ghana, it meant Ghana still owned that portion of the sea and Kosmos had no cause to worry.
Cote d’Ivoire has been claiming ownership of the billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of gas reserves reportedly found in the deep waters near the coast of Ghana.
Although the border dispute had existed for a long time, it was reignited around 2010 – the year Ghana started commercial production of oil.
Seismic data from the Ghana National petroleum Corporation (GNPC), the regulator of the country’s upstream petroleum sector, show that the disputed area covers portions of the Jubilee Field, Tweneboa, Enyenra, the Owo discoveries, West Tano-1X find and the deep water Tano block, all found in the west coast of Ghana’s territorial waters.
GNPC has already allocated some of those blocks to some oil companies, including Kosmos, to explore and develop for commercial oil production.
Kosmos Energy’s largest stake in the country, the deep water Tano discovery, is located in the disputed area, according to Mrs Adashie.
Thus, with Cote d’Ivoire still pushing its ownership claim, indications are that Kosmos will be distracted from continuing to work on their blocks.
But that is not the case with Kosmos, said the company’s communications manager.
“To us at Kosmos, it is work as usual,” she said but admitted that it was the Ghana government that could say otherwise.
“Once government has not said anything, we believe that the area is for Ghana,” she added.
Source: Daily Graphic