Construction of third FPSO underway – Terkper

The Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper, has revealed the construction of the third Floating Production Storage Offloading (FPSO) vessel is currently underway as part of measures by the government of Ghana to deal with the power crisis.

Ghana already has two FPSOs namely FPSO Kwame Nkrumah, operating from the Jubilee oil field, and FPSO John Evans Atta Mills, also producing and storing oil from the Tweneboa-Ntomme-Enyenra (TEN) offshore oil fields.

However, the country has yet to fully come out of an energy crisis which has plagued it for more than four years.

Mr Terkper on Tuesday July 12 said government was putting plans in place to deal with the systemic challenges the country was facing, including the low water levels of the Akosombo and Bui dams and the disruption in the West Africa Gas Pipeline supply.

“But in the course of doing this, you face new challenges [as seen] in the FPSO incident (which was shut down for maintenance, leading to the curtailment of gas flow from the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant to the Aboadze thermal enclave) and, then, just when gas supply was restored, you had the disruption,” he told Accra-based Joy FM.

“So what do you do? This is where you move to dual energy processing policy and, so, if you are an IPP and you are coming, don’t come in with only gas but come in with dual fuel use so that you can switch. This is one of the ways we have [to deal with the problem].

"We just sent a letter to the World Bank showing our plan under the partial rate guarantee for Sankofa [Gas Project]. We know that the third FPSO is under construction to make sure that come that time there will be no failures, so your ability to switch from gas to light crude and from light crude to gas is going to be very critical."