The Chief Executive Officer of the Petroleum Commission, Egbert Faibille Jnr, has stated that the commission is committed to ensuring transparency, and so would be liaising with stakeholders, including the media, to ensure efficient utilization of Ghana’s petroleum.
Mr. Faibille has also stressed the need for more Ghanaians to take up some of the opportunities in the oil sector.
He said this during a two-day training workshop for media practitioners at the head office of the Commission in Accra.
The Petroleum Commission’s CEO lamented that it was not right that after more than ten years of oil exploration, the patronage of locals in the upstream sector of the oil business remained low.
To this end, he said the Commission would ensure that this trend was reversed to deepen local content in the sector.
Various facilitators took media practitioners through stages and activities of the Commission, including Upstream Petroleum Value Chain, proposal licensing rounds, current energy policy on petroleum, among others.
Edem Wordi, a Geo-Scientist with the Commission, took journalists through the oil exploration history in Ghana and the processes involved in acquiring a bloc.
He disclosed that nine blocs had been earmarked to be given out soon, explaining that three of them would be through open tender, two through direct negotiations and one reserved for the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation.
“Our first class production assets will enter their natural decline phase as we continue to deplete this exhaustible natural resource. At the same time, exploration activity has slowed down since the dawn of the low price era in 2014. This has been compounded by the boundary dispute between Ghana and La Cote d’Ivoire. In fact, the last time an exploration well was drilled in Ghana was in 2014,” he revealed.
In terms of Community Relations, Judith Blay, an official of the Commission, stressed that since the discovery of oil, there had been the need to establish meaningful rapport between host communities and international oil companies.
She advocated that the benefit of the resources from oil must reach all Ghanaians, especially the host communities, adding that the Community Relations Department of the Commission derives its administrative strengths from the United Nations Sustainable Goals and the Petroleum E&D Act 2016.
Some of the journalists who attended the workshop said it had offered them the opportunity to understand how the Petroleum Commission executes its mandate and given them full understanding of some of the terms used in the oil industry.
