Jubilee Field has enough reserves - Tullow

TULLOW Ghana Limited has discounted suggestions that the inability of the Jubilee Field, operated by Tullow, to meet its production target of 120,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) is linked to the capacity of oil reserves in the field.

The company’s Corporate Communications and Investor Relations Manager, Mr Gayheart Mensah, said in an interaction with a group of Ghanaian and Ugandan journalists in the Ugandan city, Kontiki, that the problem “has nothing to do with the capacity of the resource or the field.

“The resource is there. All we need is the ability to bring it out,” he said.

Gayheart Mensah

He equally explained that the shortfall had no relationship with the floatation, production, storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) Kwame Nkrumah stationed at the Jubilee Field. Rather, Mr Mensah said the challenge was as a result of “sand seeping into the wells and chocking the perforators through which the crude flows into the vessel.”

Mr Mensah’s interaction with the journalists formed part of a training programme organised by the Revenue Watch Institute (RWI) for selected journalists from Uganda and Ghana on oil, gas and mining (OGM) issues. It is being support by the Thompson Reuters Foundation, Pens plus Bytes in Ghana and the Africa Centre for Media Excellence (ACME), based in Kampala, Uganda.

 Oil production from the Jubilee Field was initially estimated to peak at 120,000 bopd within the early months of production. The field has since produced at an average of 75,000 to 90, 000 bopd following the start of oil production late 2010, causing Tullow to shift the peak production target of 120,000 bopd to 2013.

That has since generated concerns over the ability of Tullow and its operating partners and the field in particular to achieve the target.

Although Mr Mensah admitted the blocking of wells by sand and a subsequent slowdown in production rates was normal in oil drilling, he said “it is seen as an issue here (in Ghana) because Jubilee is currently our only field.”

To help ease the blockade of the wells by the sand that was restricting the flow of crude into the FPSO, Mr Mensah said Tullow Ghana had redesigned the wells and “passed some chemicals into the well to help dissolve the sand.”

But while that happens, he said the company was also looking at integrating the Jubilee Filed with the Tweneboa-Enyera-Ntoumme (TEN) Project “to boost production rate on FPSO Kwame Nkrumah up to the target of 120,000 bopd.

A successful integration of the three oil fields along the TEN areas with the Jubilee Field – technically called unitisation – is expected to result in an enlarged oil field to be referred to as the Greater Jubilee, he added.