Accra — MUSIC, dance and fanfare dominated the day as then-President John Atta Mills, turned the valve on an offshore platform to signify the commercial production of oil and gas in commercial quantities in the Jubilee field of Cape Three Points in the Western Region of Ghana.
It is situated in the Deepwater Tano and West Cape Three Points blocks of the Tano Basin, which is one of the three offshore sedimentary basins in Ghana. The field is jointly owned by a consortium of companies called Jubilee Joint Venture and managed by Tullow Ghana Ltd, a subsidiary of UK-based Tullow Oil Plc.
Other five members of the consortium are – Kosmos Energy, Anadarko Petroleum, Petro SA and the state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), which discovered the Jubilee field in 2007 at the time Ghana was marking its 50th anniversary.
It was hoping to produce 55 000 barrels of oil per day (bpd), increasing to 120 000 barrels in six months. It currently produces 100 000 barrels of oil per day (bpd).
President Mills, who on that day on December 15 in 2010 wore safety gear and blue overalls to open the valve in a televised ceremony some 60km off the coast, from the town of Takoradi, said this was expected to earn more revenues for the development of the country.
Without doubt, Ghanaians welcomed the news with dance, music and cheers, as it could enhance revenue generation and job creation, and significantly improve the national economy.
At the time, Ghana did not have many laws in place to properly manage the new oil and gas industry.
That led to worries among the public, experts, economists and civil society actors that Ghana would be afflicted by the “resource curse” which faces resource endowed countries in Africa.
The “resource curse” often marked Africa’s oil and mining industries: decades of extraction that often saw only a few getting richer but the majority getting poorer, economic distortions caused by improperly managed resource wealth and hardly any money set aside for times when commodity prices dip or the wells dry up.
For Ghana, examples of such problems are very close to home. Nigeria, its West African neighbour — and the continent’s largest oil producer — saw successive governments deplete the estimated $ 400 billion earned from crude oil sales since the 1970s.
