The Tweneboa Enyenra Ntomme (TEN) oilfield is expected to commercially produce about 300 million barrels of oil over the next 25 years, lead managers of the project, Tullow Oil Ghana Limited, has said.
The field is expected to produce over 23,000 barrels of oil per day on average from 10 drilled wells until the end of year. After this, 14 more wells are expected to be drilled later to ramp up production to 80,000 barrels per day at full throttle.
Terry Hughes, Project Director of the TEN Field, who disclosed this at an exclusive media briefing and project exhibition on Thursday in Accra, said 80 percent of production from the field will be made up of oil while the other 20 percent comprises gas.
He added that a Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO) had been anchored over the fields with a significant amount of subsea production equipment installed on the seabed.
Fair deal
According to Alex Mould, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the GNPC, with a 15 percent ownership stake in the new oilfield, Ghana had been handed a fair deal and was better off compared to the 13 percent it had from the Jubilee Oilfield.
Kosmos Energy currently has 17.0 percent interest, while PetroSA and Anadarko have 3.8 and 17.0 percent and Tullow Oil 47.1 percent respectively.
Mr Mould emphasized: “There has been an improvement in the initial interest which is what we call the carry. We are carried. We don’t pay till production. And then we also have a participating interest where we actually pay for it once the development begins,” adding that the country spent a total of $4 billion in pre-development and the actual development which was carried.
He further explained: “We spent almost about $1 billion in pre-development and we spent about $3 billion in development of this field. So a total cost of $4 billion we were carried for most of it.”
Mr. Mould explained that the corporation ceded part of the investment in a participating investment, hence the 15 percent interest in the TEN field compared to the 13 percent interest in the Jubilee field.
He stated that government has signed other agreements in the petroleum industry that put the total benefit to over 17.5 percent interest.
Dispute
In April 2015, the Special Chamber of the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg rejected Côte d’Ivoire’s request that Ghana be ordered to suspend all oil exploration and exploitation in the disputed zone, including the TEN Project.
ITLOS ordered a number of provisional measures which both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are required to comply with and these include the continued cooperation and ‘no new drilling’ until ITLOS delivers its decision on the maritime boundary dispute which is expected in late 2017.
It is therefore assumed that development drilling will not recommence until the completion of the ITLOS proceedings.
By Samuel Boadi