Create more demand for local gas — ENI Ghana MD

The Managing Director of ENI Ghana, Mr Roberto Daniele, has said the country needs to cut its importation of gas from external sources and make use of what is produced domestically.

He said gas produced collectively from the Jubilee, Tweneboa Nnyera and Ntomme (TEN) and the Sankofa Gye Nyame (SGN) fields was enough to meet local demand, adding that as the situation stood now, excess gas was still being re-injected into the fields because of processing capacity constraint.

ENI Ghana is the operator of the SGN fields which has the capacity to produce about a 180 million standard cubic feet of gas (mscf) per day, while combined gas production from the Jubilee and TEN fields is estimated at 300mscf per day.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Graphic at the 2019 Ghana Gas Forum in Accra last Wednesday, Mr Daniele reiterated that the country had no reason to import gas because domestic gas sources were enough if fully optimised.

“There is no need to import additional gas. We have extra gas available today so there is no need for importation.

“We need to create the demand for the available gas. We need to optimise our resources and not bring in resources from outside,” he said after addressing a session at the forum.

Mr Daniele explained that it was time to make use of the domestic gas resources by creating enough demand for it to remain attractive in the industry, as well as continued investments in the upstream industry which would influence prices, bring more stability and competition.

Prospects

He explained that there was more potential to increase gas production in Ghana because operators continued to identify new opportunities for exploration.

ENI, he said, recently acquired a new block and gave an indication that exploration activity on it would be intensive from next year.

“We have done a discovery in block four this year, so we will have an appraisal well coming next year for us to complete the exploration activity,” he said.

He explained that more operators coming into the oil and gas sector in Ghana was not a competition, instead it afforded a collective opportunity to exploit the resources for the benefit of all players.

“We are not competing. In fact, we are very happy if other partners will come into the country. It is positive for the country and it will create the right volume for the country to be competitive and everyone will benefit,” he said.

He noted that although the prospects were huge, it would be too speculative to tell how much the new field would add on to ENI’s production figures in Ghana, explaining that more appraisal wells would be drilled to ascertain the levels before coming out with figures.

“For the existing wells, we can already produce more than we are doing.

We can produce at least 40 per cent more than what we are doing now.

This means there is no need to import gas,” he said.

CEO Interactive Session

As part of the two-day 2019 Ghana Gas Forum, there was a CEOs interactive session that brought together players to share perspectives on the specific challenges that various companies along the gas-to-power value chain faced, and the level of confidence that surrounded government interventions aimed at resolving weaknesses in the value chain.

The two-day conference, which was organised by The Gas Consortium (TGC), was on the theme, “Promoting dynamic policymaking towards the optimisation of regional gas resources”

The General Manager, Commercial Operations at the Ghana National Gas Company, Mr Francis Boateng, who was also part of the session, explained that there were a lot of demand opportunities for gas usage in the country, especially for industries.

He said a second gas processing plant with a proposed capacity of 150mscf per day was also in the offing to enable the country to process more of its gas.