Ghana has been one of the bright stars of the oil and gas market in the 2010s, ramping up its crude production from virtually zero to some 215kbpd by the end of the decade.
The startup of the Jubilee field in 2010, merely 3 years after its discovery, was Ghana’s first genuine claim for a place under the sun. Then came the first offshore non-associated output from Sankofa that has largely helped the domestic industries to ease their dependence on external imports and reasons for further optimism.
A string of new events, however, poses a heretofore unsettled question to all those interested in Ghana’s offshore. As is often the case with projects that exceed general expectations, the Ghanaian government might be overexerting itself in making the nascent oil industry serve its interests.
For quite some time the general political narrative cut through the West African market somewhat noiselessly. In early May 2020 Ghana’s Energy and Petroleum Minister John Peter Amewu suggested that the Sankofa oil field (operated by the Italian ENI) and the Afina oil discovery (operated by the Ghanaian Springfield) should be unified into one joint project.
