First Oil Lifted at Jubilee Field
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- Created on Wednesday, 05 January 2011 14:22
The first consignment of 86,312 metric tonnes of oil was lifted yesterday from the Jubilee Field near Cape Three Point in the Western Region.
Spike, the first vessel to market Ghana’s oil arrived at the offshore Jubilee Field by noon yesterday to lift the oil from the storage ship FPSO Kwame Nkrumah and has since departed.
The vessel, measuring 248.963 meters which arrived from Libya on Monday, has the capacity to take more than 100,000 tonnes of oil.
Captain William Thompson, Deputy Director in-charge of Inspection and Survey at the Ghana Maritime Authority (GMA), who disclosed this to the Times, said the vessel was safe to carry oil from the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah, having met the necessary international maritime requirements.
He could not mention the cost of a barrel of the sweet light crude oil to be lifted but said that would be determined by the vessel owners based on the world oil prices.
It is the first time that oil has been lifted from the Jubilee Field since commercial production began in December 15, 2010 when President John Evans Atta Mills symbolically turned the taps on the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah to start marketing the oil to the world.
Officials of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation said the jubilee Field is expected to produce about 120,000 barrels of sweet light crude oil daily with an initial capacity to 30,000 barrels daily.
The oil was first discovered in June 2007 by the Jubilee Partners and it was estimated to contain about 1.8 billion barrels, one of the largest discoveries in Africa, in recent times which is expected to transform Ghana into a significant oil producer.
Ghana has produced oil in the past, but only in very small quantities by industrial standard.
The recent oil find has set off intense interest from investors including Czech Republic, China, The USA, Russia and Lybia, among others.
In Africa, five countries – Angola, Nigeria, Lybia, Algeria and Egypt dominate upstream oil production and account for 85 percent of the continent’s oil production, according to BP Statistical Energy Survey.
By: Augustine Cobba-Biney
Source: The Ghanaian Times