The event will have on exhibition 500 Ghanaian companies from the oil and gas sector, 12 banks and insurance companies, as well as international consulting firms, including Deloitte and Ernst and Young.

The conference will also attract participants from Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Scotland, Senegal, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Brazil who will share their experiences with the participants.

The Secretary General of African Petroleum Producer Organisation (APPO) will grace the occasion.  

The eighth edition of the LCCE will coincide with the 10th year of the passage of the local content regulation in the country’s upstream petroleum sector.

It will be held on the theme: “10 Years of Local Content in Ghana’s Upstream Petroleum Industry: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects”.

Throwing some light on the four-day event, the Chief Executive Officer of the Petroleum Commission, Egbert Faibille Jr, told the Daily Graphic that Ghana was not doing local content in a vacuum and that from the way its petroleum agreements were structured, the national oil company; Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), had a participating interest of between 10 per cent to 15 per cent in every petroleum agreement.

“So apart from GNPC being there, in terms of working with the investor (international oil companies (IOCs), there are also indigenous Ghanaian businesses, businessmen who also want to work in the oil and gas exploration and production space,” he said.

That, he said, was where the Petroleum Commission came in to, within a framework of existing local content and job role localisation policy or local content laws, ensure that some of the goods and services that were used in exploration and production of oil and gas were made in Ghana or assembled in the country or as far as service was concerned, some of them were provided in Ghana.

That, Mr Faibille said, was to ensure that citizens would not only be seen to be benefiting but actually benefiting.

Passage

The Petroleum Commission CEO said since 2013 when the local content and local participation regulations, LI 2204, came into reality, a significant number of the people, indigenous Ghanaian businesses, had played and continue to play critical roles in the provision of various goods and services in exploration and production activity.

For example, he said looking at the 10 fields, the Jubilee Fields and the Sankofa Gye Nyame Fields, “you would see that whether from exploration or discovery or appraisal or field development or production, Ghanaian companies are either joint venture partners with foreign companies or independent indigenous Ghanaian companies who are providing various services to the upstream oil and gas sector”. 

Job creation

When it came to the issue of job creation, he said a lot of Ghanaians had also secured jobs.

“Petroleum exploration and production is a very technical area and so we need qualified people.

So you see a lot of Ghanaians working with some of these companies at the very level of that exploration and production as petroleum engineers or geo scientists. 

And when it comes to, for instance, working on the drill ships or the FPSOs, you also see a lot of Ghanaians in very sensitive positions and also working as technicians, production technicians, instrumentation technicians and electrical technicians,” he said.

Key stakeholders

The Director, Local Content of the Petroleum Commission, Kwaku Boateng, among other things, said the LCCE would bring key stakeholders in the oil and gas sector and international partners to look at what was happening in the local industry.

That, he said, was particularly to the development of local content in the upstream oil and gas sector.