Give full disclosure on FPSO shutdown – Dr. Manteaw

Ghanaians ought to be told the full truth about the challenges facing the Floating Production Storage Offloading vessel FPSO Kwame Nkrumah and the varied implications of the shutdown, energy expert, Dr. Steve Manteaw has demanded.

According to him, the full cost and the length of time of the repair works must be declared.

“We are unable to tell the cost of this short-term remedial measure and, indeed, the authorities have not disclosed all the details about the hitch on the FPSO and that fact that it could take another eight weeks,” he submitted.

Dr Manteaw was speaking to journalists on a training workshop organised by the Institute of Financial and Economic Journalists (IFEJ) in Dodowa in the Greater Accra Region.

The two-day training session was to interrogate the 2014 reports from the Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GHETI) on the mining, oil and gas sectors.

Dr Manteaw, who is also a Co-Chair of GHETI, explained that, “Ghanaians are not being told the full truth about the FPSO because Tullow is listed on the London Stock Exchange and if the indication is given that there is a major hitch to its operations in Jubilee, the values of its shares are likely to drop.”

Cosmos could also suffer some loss in share value but Ghanaians reserve the right to know the full details and the implications for the national budget since the budget has been premised on projected revenue from the petroleum sector.

“At the moment we are not producing oil and so we are not getting associated gas and so it has implications for Ghana’s power generation,” he said.

Should the shutdown prolong any further, it will have implications for the country’s sufficiency in Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).

It will be recalled that Petroleum Minister Emmanuel Kofi Buah last week admitted that repair works on the vessel were complicated and unlikely to be completed on the set date.

The vessel’s turret suffered some damage, making it difficult to receive crude oil from subsea pipes.

“I have been on the FPSO and I know how complicated the process is,” he said, adding it was unlikely it will be ready on the set date, April 21.

Tullow Ghana Limited, lead partners in the Jubilee oilfield, on March 20 served notice that it will be shutting down the facility for what it described as “mandatory inspection and maintenance”.