Page 12 - AfrOil Week 09 2020

AfrOil PROJECTS & COMPANIES AfrOil
The Pecan oilfield lies within the DWT/CTP block (Image: Tullow Oil)
Ghana’s president hopes
for FID on Pecan project soon
GHANA
GHANA’S President Nana Akufo-Addo said last week that he hoped Aker Energy (Norway) would make a decision about the development of the Pecan offshore field in the near future.
“We expect that within one month or two the final [investment] decision could come,” he told reporters in Oslo. He did not say whether Aker Energy had given any indication of its intention, but he did describe the Pecan project, which has an estimated price tag of $4.4bn, as a “major investment.”
When queried by Reuters, the Norwegian company indicated that Akufo-Addo’s opti- mism might be overstated. “Aker Energy is, in collaboration with relevant authorities and licence partners, working on an updated plan for the Pecan field, on which an approval and a subsequent final investment decision [FID] would be based ... The updated plan will be final- ised more or less within this timeline [of one or two months], followed by an approval process leading up to an FID,” a company spokesman told the news agency by email.
Pecan is a field within the Deepwater Tano Cape/Three Points (DTC/TP) block offshore
Ghana. It is believed to contain 450-550mn barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in recoverable reserves.
Aker Energy submitted a preliminary devel- opment plan to Ghanaian authorities in March 2019. At the time, it declared that it hoped to develop the field within the framework of a wider plan to exploit the block. Subsequently, though, it said it had decided to develop Pecan on a stand-alone basis, without focusing on hydrocarbon reserves in other sections of the DTC/TP block.
Since then, Ghana’s government has been pushing Aker Energy to accelerate the pace of work on the project. It also took the step of ask- ing Members of Parliament to approve changes to the country’s licensing laws last November in the hope of launching production as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, the parties have yet to reach agreement.
Equity in the Pecan project is split between Aker Energy, the operator, with 50%; Lukoil (Russia), with 38%; state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corp. (GNPC), with 10%, and Fueltrade (Ghana), with 2%. ™
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Week 09 04•March•2020