Reinforce investment drive in petroleum sector- PIAC to govt

The Public Interest and Accountability Committee ,PIAC is urging government to revive investments into Ghana’s petroleum sector and take bold steps to expand investments into the West African sub-region .

Technical Manager at PIAC, Mr Mark Agyeman outlined some strategies government could pursue to bring substantial benefits to the country.

“We need to quicken our investment drive into the upstream petroleum sector by bringing on board more wells and thereby increasing our production and if we do that we can even adopt a strategy where we can domesticate our petroleum market and also regionalise that same market, so kind of crawling back from the international market into a regional one that is the African market,” Mr Agyeman explained.

He noted further that the 400million people market in West Africa alone was a major boost and an opportunity for Ghana to use part of its petroleum production for domestic consumption.

“ We give our local production to Tema Oil Refinery and the newly set up refinery to refine for domestic consumption then we look at the West African sub-region and export the remainder of what was produced for local consumption,” Mr Agyeman said.

If Ghana would attract big oil companies into its petroleum sector, then government must be prepared to make the requite investments to make the sector attractive. It will be recalled that Ghana’s last licencing rounds which sought investors to take up some oil blocks was far from successful.

Mr Agyeman advised government to do the needful, by investing into quality data and increasing the sizes of the blocks to attract investors.