The move, which follows a failed bid to get an additional exploration licence in the maiden oil and gas licensing bid round, is to help Tullow Ghana find more resources as it remains focused on increasing production.

The Executive Vice-President of Tullow Ghana, Mr Kweku Awotwi, explained that there were more opportunities for Tullow to expand its production base in Ghana and the company would continue to explore that.

“When you look at Jubilee and the Tweneboa Enyera and Ntomme (TEN) Fields, we have over a billion barrels of resources that we now have to bring into reserve, so there is a lot of opportunity.

“There are a number of areas within what we call our development and producing area (DPA) that we do not have rights to, so we are actually in active discussions with the government on how we can bring them on through the things we are doing. Even within the Plan of Development (PoD) that was approved long ago, there are other targets,” he said.

Touching on the performance of the company, Mr Awotwi said performance in exploration had slowly been stabilising over time.  

“I think the idea is to be able to increase that even further. I think the idea really is to continually look for improvement and that is what it is. This year we expect to do better than last year,” he said.

He also mentioned that Tullow Ghana had committed US$10 million over the next five years to support the building of infrastructure as part of the government’s flagship Free Senior High School (SHS) programme.

“We have already identified up to 20 schools across the country, probably a lot of them are in the Western Region for obvious reasons, but we have made sure that there are schools in every single region of the country that we will support.

Guayana discovery

Tullow Oil Plc recently announced the results of its Jethro-1 exploration well, drilled on the Orinduik licence offshore Guyana by its wholly owned subsidiary Tullow Guyana B.V.

The Jethro-1 was drilled by the Stena Forth drillship to a total depth of 4,400m metres in approximately 1,350 metres of water.

Evaluation of logging data confirms that Jethro-1 is the first discovery on the Orinduik licence and comprises high quality oil bearing sandstone reservoirs of Lower Tertiary age.

“We have seen a minimum of 100 million barrels, but we have to drill more wells to really see what is there.

The initial discovery suggests that it is commercial, so that means we will be doing more work,” he said.
 
He added that the new discovery presented a lot of opportunity for Tullow as an organisation, as well as Ghanaians to work in the sector.

“It is good for Tullow Plc and it is also good for employees of Tullow, and Ghanaians make a big part of Tullow, so it creates more opportunities for our Ghanaians.

We already have some of our own Ghanaian geoscientists who are going to be part of the exploration in Guyana,” he noted.  

Media training

The occasion was a two-day media training programme organised by Tullow Ghana, in collaboration with the Rigworld Training Centre.

It was to help build the capacity of the media to be able to understand issues and effectively report on happenings in the sector.

Mr Awotwi noted that the training programme, which was held in both Accra and Takoradi, was part of an ongoing engagement with the media to help build capacity to effectively interrogate issues in the oil and gas industry.

“We recognise that the oil and gas industry is quite young, and quite technical; but the more people like yourself understand the business, ask questions and appreciate the complexities of the business, the more we think we can have a better conversation about oil and gas and the industry,” he said.