Ghana Gas won't apologise for not meeting timelines – Dr. Yankey

Chief executive of Ghana National Gas Company, Dr. George Adjah Sipa Yankey, has said the company has no apology to offer to anybody for not meeting its timelines. He said for the past two years, since the project started, Ghana Gas has been very ambitious in the gas project and its assessment indicated that the company has chalked great success.

“The strategy of Ghana Gas is that we are very ambitious and that is what has brought us to where we are today,'' Dr. Yankey said, adding that his outfit was not apologetic because its ambition was what had driven it and in less than two years, it has been able to put up such a complex project.

He said Ghana Gas has laid 111kilometres pipelines from the Jubilee fields which traversed seven districts in the Western Region. Dr. Yankey was speaking at the Ghana Summit on oil and gas in Accra.

Some critics have said the project has taken too long in meeting its timelines, a situation that was causing waste of resources through gas flaring.

Tullow Oil, a couple of weeks ago, was reported to have said it could no longer wait for Ghana Gas to complete its project to receive gas that would have been supplied to Ghana Gas to process, for lack of enough storage facilities at Tullow oil. So the gas would have to be flared.

Dr. Yankey said some temporary storage facilities were being put up by the company and hoped the project would be completed in this month in order to receive the gas that would have been flared. He said when the gas project was completed, the power rationing would be drastically minimised as there would be constant supply of gas to supply to the thermal plants in the country to generate power.

This, according to Dr. Yankey, would reduce the cost of tariffs and urged Ghana to pursue full industrialisation with the gas value chain. Reacting to the security of the gas pipelines, he said the Ghanaian national security was supportive in the provision of specialised cameras as well as swift security control system to monitor and detect intruders who would want to vandalise the pipelines.