The Ghana Gas Company says it is awaiting the upstream jubilee partners to open their well for the company to process the gas.
The Atuabo Gas project is said to be 99.87% complete as it moves from the engineering phase to testing and commissioning phase.
The $850 million project was supposed to have opened in December but stalled due to difficulties in securing the disbursement of $600 million from the Chinese Development Bank, part of a $3 billion loan agreement signed in 2011.
This greatly affected President Mahama’s government which is struggling to tackle the country’s energy problems and has spent more money than its budget projections on oil imports. This some say has in turn worsened the fiscal deficit.
President John Mahama who toured the project site to acquaint himself with work than so far disclosed that the commissioning of the project is likely to be at the close of the year. The President says the completion of the project would bring some micro economic stability easing pressure on the cedi.
“We are quite satisfied with the work we’ve seen so far and the next major work will be the tying-in phase which will see the tying of the project to the FPSO. It will save us almost half a billion dollars a year in light crude using the gas from the FPSO.”
The Western Corridor Gas Infrastructure Development Project being the Atuabo gas project includes a 111-km pipeline in the Western Region that will take gas via Atuabo to thermal turbines at Aboadze run by the Volta River Authority that will generate 500 megawatts of power.
Spokesperson for the Ghana Gas company Alfred Ogbamey says as far as the Ghana gas Company is concerned the project is complete and they are waiting for the tie-in to the FPSO and that they expected their vessel to do the tie-in for the gas to flow but the jubilee partners have requested that their own vessel rather does the tie-in and this will be done by mid October this year.
“Ghana Gas would not have anything to do with delays because we have finished. We are waiting for the upstream operators to tie in our pipeline to their flexible riser, open their well and let the gas flow unto our us for us to process and send it to downstream customers.”
