The Africa Centre for Energy Policy is urging the government to introduce open contracting in the Petroleum sector as a way of ensuring efficiency, accountability and transparency in the country’s oil and gas industry.
According to the Civil Society Organisation, the country’s current regimes for licensing oil concessions fall short of open contracting standards.
ACEP believes that, when the Petroleum Exploration and Production Bill is passed with the needed urgency that it deserves, citizens will begin to benefit from the oil and gas proceeds that come to the country.
On December 15, 2010, Ghana became an oil and gas-producing country when the “first oil” was inaugurated at Jubilee Field. Prior to inaugurating the first oil, the nation announced the discovery of commercial quantities of oil and gas at what is dubbed Jubilee Field 1 on June 17, 2007.
This discovery, one of the largest in the last decade in Africa, was made by the Jubilee Partners, namely Tullow, Anadarko, Kosmos, E&O Group, Sabre Oil & Gas and Ghana’s own national oil company, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).
However speaking in an interview with Live Business News at a Multi Stakeholder Forum on Open Contracting Processes in the Petroleum Exploration and Production bill 2013, the Executive Director for ACEP, Dr. Mohammed Amin Adam, disclosed that, the country has lost huge revenues all these years as a result of the unavailability of the open contract system in the country.
According to him, when it is not dealt with appropriately, no substantive revenue will be made from oil exploration in the future.
