Increase sizes of oil blocks to attract more investments to sector – Dr Manteaw

The government has been urged to increase the sizes of the country’s oil blocks to attract more in­vestment to the sector to increase oil production.

In addition, the government must improve the oil exploration data from 2D which is a way to look at the underground rocks and layers where oil and gas is found, to 3D to make the oil data and sector attractive to investors and help them to find more oil.

The Co-chair of the Multi Stakeholder Group of Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), Dr Steve Manteaw, stated this in an inter­view with the Ghanaian Times after the launch of the 2021/2022 GHEITI Mining and Oil and Gas Reports.

The 2021-2022 Reports which provides reconciliatory reports for mining, oil and gas bring to 29, the total number of reports published since Ghana acceded to the GHEITI, and comprising 18 mining and oil and gas reports.

He said policy and regulatory predictability would go a long way to attract more investment to the oil and gas sector to increase production.

From a peak of 71.44 million in 2019, crude oil output from Gha­na’s three main fields dropped to 48.25 million barrels in 2023, representing a decrease of 9.2 per cent.

Ghana’s oil and gas production is on the decline due in part to the factors such as the natural decline in production, lack of additional blocks to bring in more oil and other technical issues such as equipment upsets in the SGN.

He said Ghana was losing investment in oil production juris­dictions such as Guyana in South America due to the small sizes of Ghana’s oil blocks, poor data and policy unpredictability.

He explained that Ghana quick­ly had to introduce incentives to make the oil and gas sector more attractive to investors to harness the oil and gas sector to accelerate national development.

Dr Manteaw said Ghana would have stranded oil and gas assets in view of the transition from fossil to cleaner energy, if it did not ex­plore fully it oil and gas reserves before the country’s full energy transition in 2070.

The Co-chair of MSG of GHEITI said investors needed policy and regulatory stability es­pecially on the fiscal side, to turn their attention to Ghana.

Highlighting on the report, Dr Manteaw said the mining sector’s contribution to the country’s Gross Domestic Product declined from GH¢11.449 billion in 2020 to GH¢10.05 billion in 2021 rep­resenting a decrease of 11.7 per cent and increased to GH¢13.025 billion in 2022, representing an increase of 28.9 per cent.

He said gold production in 2021 shrunk by 91.7 per cent mainly due to the introduction of a three per cent Withholding Tax on small-scale production of unprocessed minerals.

On the oil and gas sector, Dr Manteaw said the upstream oil and gas sector of Ghana contrib­uted 4.89 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product of Ghana, 6.91 per cent of total government revenue, and 7.03 per cent of domestic revenues in 2021.

Dr Manteaw called for the adoption of more ambitious timelines for Ghana’s energy transition agenda, noting that the global shift to thermal ener­gy had sparked a new race towards sustainable and affordable supply of clean energy and Ghana could not afford to come to the race too late.

The Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Abdulai Jinapor, in remarks made on his behalf lauded GHEITI for the reports.

 BY KINGSLEY ASARE

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