Dr Steve Manteaw, Co-Chair of the Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative has warned that Ghana’s oil wells could all dry up very soon unless there are new discoveries. Steve Manteaw was reacting to the latest Public Interest and Accountability Committee, PIAC report that Ghana has recorded a decline in oil output for 4 years.
He said the wells currently under use are fast depleting so unless the country can find new wells, there will be no oil in about a decade.
“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.”
Steve Manteaw added that Ghana’s oil blocks are not big enough so the oil found is not in large quantities.
“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.”
According to Steve Manteaw, because the active wells have depleted in volumes, there is a requirement to use other means to force them to produce more. He said apart from adopting “artificial measures” to bring out more oil, there is nothing that can be done except to find new oil blocks.
“Jubilee is 12 or 13 years into its production life. It’s projected to have a lifespan of 25 years. Now it’s more like halfway through its production life. So you naturally expect a decline because reservoir pressure is being depleted.
“So they have to kind of adopt artificial measures, either gas injection, water injection, and the like to bring on stream more oil,” he said on Joy News’ PM Express on May 22.