The Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Societe Nationale d’Operations Petrolieres (Petroci), Mr. Daniel Gnangni, has advised Ghanaians to maintain peace to sustain smooth operations in the oil and gas industry in Ghana.
He said, “War is not a good thing and I am sure Ghana has learnt from Cote d’Ivoire’s experience-we have gone back 10 years, and Ghana should not go the way of war in their elections.”
Petroci, the national oil company of Cote d’Ivoire, was established in 1995 and in 1998 restricted to a holding company activities with the mandate to promote the Ivorian sedimentary basin and expansion of oil and gas resources through the development of oil and gas fields in that country.
Addressing visiting Ghanaian journalists on a field trip to Cote d’Ivoire to get first-hand information on that country’s oil sector, Mr. Gnangni said peace was essential for the sustenance of the oil sector in the country, and stressed that without peace, the sector could face major setbacks.
He explained that the recent crisis that occurred in Cote d’Ivoire scared most investors, who closed down their oil operations and left the country and added that it affected production research being carried out at that time.
Mr. Gnangni, however said, “Offshore oil production was not affected”.
On the maritime boundary issue involving Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, Mr. Gnangni said there was the need for both countries to come to a mutual agreement and expressed the hope that on-going dialogue between the two countries would result in an amicable solution to the problem.
He said Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire could also explore an alternative deal such as giving “the contracts of that concession to an investor to explore and produce and split the proceeds to their mutual benefits.”
Mr. Gnangni said, “We can also look at the issue of collaboration to explore the oil within our boundary and share them between our countries.”
He said that low performance could partly be explained by the natural depletion of existing oil fields, technical difficulties encountered at certain oil fields and the lack of ??new discoveries in the past many years.
Mr. Gnangni said Côte d’Ivoire’s current oil production was between 35,000 and 40,000 barrels of crude oil and 140,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas per day.
He said about 70 per cent of the country’s electricity was produced by natural gases extracted from the ground.
He said presently, only 30 per cent of sedimentary basin has been explored in Cote d’Ivoire with most of the exploited fields, located at a depth of less than 200m.
He said the Ivorian government's ambition was to rapidly attain production level of 200,000 oil barrels and 300,000,000 cubic feet of gas per day through the intensification and exploration activities by 2015.
“When we reach those production levels, be it in the middle or short term, we will have sufficient resources to allow the oil sector in Côte d’Ivoire to substantially increase its contribution to Côte d’Ivoire’s national budget,” Mr Gnangni said.**
Copyright © 1994 - 2024 GhanaWeb. All rights reserved.
