A former Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Tsatsu Tsikata, has asked the Management of the Corporation to actively engage investors to add value to Ghana’s crude oil.
He also encouraged the Corporation to increase local content and participation in the oil and gas sector as well as utilisation of appropriate technologies in line with the objective of the establishment of GNPC.
“GNPC has got to be proactive in identifying value opportunities from the work that’s going on with these foreign investors to generate more national value,” Mr Tsikata said in an interview in Accra.
He said that in the period of the establishment and active operation of GNPC (in 1985), the Corporation signed agreements with a few significant international companies like Almaco, Shell, Unocal and Alco.
“Those agreements led to a new phase of exploration, especially in the offshore Western part of Ghana, and laid the foundation for the major oil discovery in 2007,” the private legal practitioner said.
Ghanaians were also trained in countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and London in geosciences, geology, geophysics, and engineering.
That, he said, helped to build a human resource base to effectively manage the petroleum resources of the country and to meet demands of the international industry, especially in negotiations.
Mr Tsikata, therefore, urged GNPC to step up efforts in enhancing its human resource capacity to position the Corporation to attract more investment to address challenges in the energy sector.
On local participation, he said: “It’s something that must happen overtime…For example, Almaco is there, and you have people from GNPC working with them, Shell is doing something, and you have your people working with them, and that’s what will enable the needed technology transfer to occur.”
“We’ve got to go beyond just having one national Corporation to a situation where in the supply of goods and services for this capital-intensive operation, you make sure that Ghanaians are more engaged,” he advised.
The government aims to address the challenges in the energy sector with a US$3 billion loan-support programme from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
That would be done under the Post COVID-19 Programme for Economic Growth (PC-PEG), which the government seeks to use to limit its growing fiscal cost and clear the stock of payables over seven years.
It is expected that an update of the Energy Sector Recovery Plan (ESRP) would be done by the end of June 2023, with assistance from the World Bank.
The recovery plan focuses on expediting Purchasing Power Agreements renegotiations (to reduce the take-or-pay liability), tariff adjustments, and improving operational performance of energy State Owned Enterprises (SOEs).
There would also be a reform of subsidies to reduce the revenue shortfall, and the formulation of a strategy (with clear benchmarks) on the reduction of distribution losses and improving collections.
