You cannot stop companies from flaring gas if there isn’t enough investment - ACEP

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye, has stated that companies in the oil and gas sector cannot be stopped from flaring gas if there is no commercial use for gas.

He added that Ghana needs more investments to unlock gas and plants to process and store excess gas.

He noted that until these conditions get better, companies will continue flaring gas.

“If there’s no commercial avenue to use gas, you cannot compel them not to flare gas for operational reasons. If there are no commercial applications for the market, they have to flare the gas. We need investment to unlock the gas, once you produce it, you need to process it. We don’t have enough capacity to construct another processing plant. We will need to build a new site to store the additional gas from TEN and Jubilee Fields.

“…Once we have the capacity challenge, then we need to flare. That is why we are where we are, we are flaring the gas, and we are looking for liquid fuel,” he was quoted by citinewsroom.com.

Ben Boakye called on the government to diversify fuel sources by implementing policies that allow for the establishment of processing plants in order to get excess gas for other purposes.

“I always say we are getting the policy action wrong, that is why we are where we are. If we have ENI producing in a more constant way, you could discuss with investors to help you pump in more gas by setting up a new processing plant. We have to think politically along the value change…we haven’t done the policy right,” he suggested.

The 2022 Annual Public Interest Accountability Committee (PIAC) Report on Management and Use of Petroleum Revenue has revealed that a total of 25.3 billion cubic feet (bcf) of natural gas worth about $169 million was lost in the upstream petroleum sector through flaring.

The volume of gas flared in 2022 increased by 19.3 per cent compared to a volume of 21.2 bcf recorded in 2021.

This constituted about 10 per cent of the total 253.56 bcf of both Associated Gas (AG) and Non-Associated Gas (NAG) produced from the three oil fields of Jubilee, Sankofa Gye-Nyame (SGN), and Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN).

SSD/DA