Commend NDC for oil found

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has said that it is wrong to trace the recent oil find to the efforts of the Busia Administration of 1969 to 1972 and the current New Patriotic Party (NPP) alone.
It said Ghana’s efforts to come across oil dates back to 1896 and not under the Busia and Kufuor regimes.
Dr Kwame Ampofo, a former Ranking Member for the Parliamentary Select Committee on Mines and Energy, who said this at a press conference in Accra yesterday, said it was rather the PNDC/NDC regime whose efforts had yielded the current result.
This was in reaction to some statements by President J.A. Kufuor on the current oil find at the recent rally of the NPP at Kasoa and its national conference in Sekondi-Takoradi.
He said President Kufuor was alleged to have remarked that “the search for oil started under the Busia Regime but was stalled with the overthrow of the government by the Acheampong coup d’etat. The resources simply vanished thereafter but resurfaced under the NPP Administration”.
Dr Ampofo said it was the PNDC that decided to revolutionise the oil and petroleum sector by passing the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) Law, 1983, (PNDCL64), under which suitable staff of the Petroleum Department were transferred to form the core of GNPC.
He said to accelerate exploration efforts, the GNPC also funded the acquisition, processing and interpretation of the first Three-D seismic data over the South Tano Fields and other areas between 1989 and 1991 and subsequently drilled several wells that established the viability of three wells.
Dr Ampofo said it was on record that the GNPC produced over 62,000 of oil in the South Tano Fields under the PNDC in 1992, which was refined at the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR).
He said the GNPC, through appraisal work conducted, estimated that reserves in the South Tano Fields alone contained over 14 million barrels of oil and 193 billion cubic feet of gas.
Dr Ampofo said since these fields were owned by Ghana it was unreasonable for the NPP Administration to treat them as pure exploration assets, because they should have been excluded from the current exploration agreement with Tullow Energy.
He alleged that this bad agreement with Tullow Energy had culminated in unnecessary delay in the availability and use of indigenous gas power generation, which was needed by the national economy through the Osagyefo Power Barge that was constructed for that purpose.
He also expressed concern about reports that the NPP Government had already mortgaged Ghana’s oil reserves and was also in the process of trading off more of the oil reserves with Gabon and other countries to offset difficulties in the economy.
Dr Ampofo also urged the government to look for ways of saving the Volta River Authority (VRA) and the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) which were owing $800 million and $500 million respectively.