Ghana will gain revenues worth $1 billion next year from its nascent petroleum industry, authorities have projected.
Out of the total, participating interest from crude oil will fetch the West African country $537.61 million, corporate income tax – $261.13 million, royalties from the sale of crude – $238.1 million, and surface rentals will be $0.9 million, the Petroleum Commission announced.
The commission also pressed on the need to pursue an aggressive replacement drive for further reserves on the oil fields, so as to hasten and attract investment for economic development.
The new drive, the PC said, must include further exploration and appraisal within the development and production area, a multi-client seismic data acquisition to fast-track exploration and also work on the Volta basin.
“Sustained investor attraction must focus on promotion of Ghana’s sedimentary basin, planned further licensing rounds and direct negotiations for open acreage. We also need new policies and guidelines on local content and participation,” Phoebe Afful, a staff at the Project Evaluation Department of the PC stated.
She added, ” Three fields have been developed and producing since the inception of commercial hydrocarbons discovery to date namely the Jubilee, Tweneboah, Enyera, Ntomme (TEN) and the Off- Cape Three Point (OCTP) fields. Ghana risks production decline if no further reserves are developed.”
Post-COVID economic recovery
In other news, Ghana’s economy grew at the fastest pace in more than a year in Q3, driven by the uptick in the services industry as schools that were forced to close last year because of the coronavirus pandemic reopened.
Government Statistician Samuel Kobina Annim said GDP expanded 6.6% in the three months through September from a year earlier. That compares with a revised expansion of 5.1% in the second quarter.
The services sector expanded 13.4% in the quarter, with the education subsector expanding 24.2% after children returned to school. The government halted all in-person learning in March 2020, and only began reopening schools in January.
The agricultural sector grew 9.2%, led by fishing, which expanded 14.3%. Quarter-on-quarter overall GDP expanded 1.6%.
The cedi (Ghana’s currency) has depreciated 5.2% this year against the U.S. dollar, trading at 6.1863 per dollar by market close on Tuesday, the weakest since 1994.
