Ghana Gas saves $288m on use of local engineers, technicians

The Ghana National Gas Company has saved the country $288 million in recent years by using local engineers and technicians to man its gas infrastructure.

According to the Chief Executive Officer of the company, Dr Ben K.D. Asante, the company saved $3 million a month when it used indigenous Ghanaians instead of the Chinese.

He mentioned areas the Ghanaians operated in to include the control rooms, processing floors and places where the storage tanks and utilities were located.

Ghanaians

"Certainly not one person is a foreigner. They are all Ghanaians, every one; to the control room, to the processing floors, to where the storage tanks are, where the utilities are, every one of them is being manned by Ghanaians," he said.

Dr Asante said this when the Ghana Gas took its turn at the Ministry of Information press briefing in Accra yesterday.

Speaking on the topic: “The Ghana Gas Story, accelerating Ghana’s energy and economic growth, he explained that Ghana Gas infrastructure, installed in 2014, was operated by the Chinese who helped set it up.

He said the company took a bold step to train young Ghanaian men and women to operate the infrastructure "to man the control rooms, go to the processing floors, to be at the storage facilities and handle all of them"

That, Dr Asante said, was done in April 2017.

Aside from the savings made, it had also created about a 1,000 permanent and contract employments.

Significant

He said what was even more significant was that the company was able to increase the intellectual capacity in an industry as sophisticated as the gas industry.

He said using indigenous Ghanaian engineers and technicians who "took over from the Chinese in 2017 has been a very significant milestone in the operating life of Ghana Gas"

In Trinidad and Tobago, he said it took them 60 years to indigenise while it took Nigeria 50 years to have Nigerians to operate its infrastructure.

"But for Ghana Gas and for Ghana, it took less than three years," he emphasised.

“Indigenous Ghanaian engineers/technicians took over the operations of the plant completely from the Chinese in April 2017. It took Trinidad 60 years to fully indigenise; Nigeria 50 years;

Ghana Gas took less than three years,” he said, and that the company had built a solid intellectual capital to sustain the industry, and that there had been “no loss-time to injury.”  

CSR

Touching on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the company, he said the company had over the years completed 404 projects that included health and educational facilities, skills training, provision of water and sanitation facilities.

He said the company did not only concentrate where its infrastructure was located in the Western Region, and that it covered all the 16 regions of the country.

About 88 other projects, he said, were ongoing to the tune of about half a billion cedis.

"So we take that very seriously - our corporate social responsibility," he said.

Asked about the high cost of electricity, Dr Asante said the cost of gas that  delivered power generation was not just the commodity and infrastructure.

“It is a combination of the services that take that gas and move it from point A to point B – from the source to the market.  When we get gas from Atuabo for instance, that gas is at a particular cost, we have to add processing cost, we have to add transportation cost and certainly a bit of distribution to make it the delivered cost of the gas,” he said.

Component

He said currently the most significant component of the gas cost was the commodity, and that it took about 75 per cent of the total cost of the delivered gas, adding that “that gas is outside the perview of Ghana Gas, Ghana Gas is only for the services, so we are talking about the processing and the transportation tariffs which are not that significant”  

On power outages, he said the problem could not just be with gas but a combination of commodity shortage or infrastructure outage.

He said looking at the use of compressed natural gas for vehicular transport was a good, especially when the country was trying to decarbonise its energy portfolio.

He said besides the cost which was cheaper, it was also atmospherically responsive.