Excess capacity of gas supply putting pressure on government’s finances – Energy Expert

An Energy expert Ben Boakye is pushing for a review of the agreement covering the country’s gas supply stating that the current state of the agreement is putting a lot of pressure on the country's finance.

Speaking on an Accra-based JoyNews and monitored by GhanaWeb, Mr Boakye said the contracts and agreement must be relooked because the laws in which these contracts are grounded, is the major challenge because whether “we use it or not we will have to pay”.

“We have contracts such as the Offshore Cape Three Points (OCTP) that are firmly grounded in laws and agreements and we are going to pay whether we take it or not so that makes our situation very much difficult. We going to have to pay if urgent decisions are not made, we are going have to pay for those imported gas that may not be needed and also pay for what we are not consuming from the OCTP project,” he said.

He further stated that “optimizing the domestic gas will ensure that the take or pay contracts are lessened to allow Ghana to make savings because we are paying about Ghc 500million per annum and that is a bit ticket expenditure we have to ensure that sector pay for and not the budget or taxes that we collect from citizens. We made recommendations that we decouple the terminal infrastructure from the commodity and that was consistent with all the advice that we had from the World Bank and some technical people who work around the sector but sadly, we see the commodity also coming which could be around $200 million dollars on us.”

Mr Boakye said the expenditures cannot be offset with all the resources the country has hence the need for stringent measures to address it.

Meanwhile, Ghana has a current minimum gas supply capacity of about 340 million standard cubic fit per day as against 320 million in the last quarter.