Ghana's Energy Sector, Oil and Gas News
Old rigs beg for decommissioning
After the euphoria and funfair that greeted the discovery of oil, a major issue that needs attention is decommissioning. Once machinery and equipment were mobilised at the commissioning of the production, they have to be decommissioned after oil.
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One of the major aspects of the oil and gas industry is the decommissioning of all offshore deep or shallow water installations that helped in bringing the oil from the reserves to the oil-head for onward export.
At the end of oil production, every installation, from the drill rigs, production platforms to subsea installations, pieces of pipes, has to be removed.
The decommissioning process should start with the start of exploitative processes. It must be flexible, transparent and above all subject to public consultation.
In Ghana, even before the country started actual decommissioning of known installations from offshore Ghana, a weak old rig known as the North Sea Pioneer (NSP) anchored at the front of the Home Port of the Western Naval Command for more than two decades was already on the verge of collapse.
NSP, which has been in Ghanaian waters since the early 1990s, is currently at anchorage at the Western Naval Command in Sekondi yet to be decommissioned. Efforts to get state agencies to comment on the decommissioning of Africa Wave and NSP have yielded no results. The owner, Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), has also refused to comment.
Danger
It is important to note that, while the country has joined the community of oil producing nations, NSP should have been used to set good example for international oil companies.
Apart from the NSP, is the Africa Wave, an old oil tanker used on the Saltpond Oil Field, which was anchored next to the NSP. It broke its chain in 2012 and run aground at Essipon. The impact is that it will not take long for African Wave to start leaking the remaining hydrocarbon in it, which will ultimately kill aquatic life and pollute the lovely shores of Essipon, Shama and beyond.
For NSP, it is weak and it is just a matter of time for the hazardous chemicals it may be carrying to spill, should it collapse. This can affect marine life and shores across Sekondi, Takoradi, Shama, Elmina and towards Winneba. It is important for it to be moved from its current location and properly decommissioned by scrapping through the use of appropriate technology.
The focus of government agencies responsible for the removal of the offshore installation should ensure that the taxpayer does not end up footing the bills for such decommissioning exercises.
Future installations
As the country produces oil, various regulatory authorities have to start educating the public on the issues of decommissioning and not wait until after two or more decades.
The production platform, ??FPSO?? Kwame Nkrumah, has a lifespan, and beneath it are subsea structures. The ??TEN?? Project is about to commence, another FPSO is being built in that regard; the Deep Water Tano, ENI and Lukoil projects will also take-off soon .
Implications
It is, therefore, very important that Ghana, after joining the community of oil-producing nations, starts educating the public or the resource owners that there is something called decommissioning and plans and makes funds available for it.
Therefore, as Ghana started inundating its coastlines with floating and subsea structures, it is important legislations are enforced to ensure the decommissioning of all installations offshore.
Legal implications of decommissioning have to be made clearer from the perspective of the international law.
In the global oil and gas industry, international conventions precisely require a complete removal and operators have to set aside significant amount of funds to ensure that after extracting, they restore the environment to its original state.
Ghana has to start by applying the legal treatment of decommissioning from the global to the regional levels to ensure that the country is not overtaken by events.
Today and tomorrow
As the country prides itself among a community of oil-producing nations, it is very important to note that decommissioning on the part of the regulator and the industry has gone through a considerable change after the environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO) Greenpeace led the crusade.
It is, therefore, important for authorities to start telling the Ghanaians how NSP will be decommissioned and that after 20-25 years of FPSO Kwame Nkrumah and other production platforms.
In that process, it should clearly send a signal to the public that the environmental protection aspects of the decommissioning are rigorous, robust, uncontentious as well as there is enough funding to see the process through.
As more exploration and exploitation are ongoing, the country should ensure that proper evaluation are carried out to answer the question, if it is worth extracting today for a better tomorrow, and at the peril of generations unborn. Or should we set aside some of the funds realised today, to finance an environmentally safe tomorrow?