Ghana must urgently set up a high-level technical team to diagnose and rescue its struggling upstream petroleum industry, the Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Management and Sustainable Energy (CEMSE), Benjamin Nsiah, has urged.
According to the energy policy analyst, the sharp decline in oil output, from 71 million barrels in 2019 to a projected 37 million barrels by the end of 2025, signals a sector in distress and calls for coordinated, decisive action before it collapses entirely.
Nsiah warned that Ghana’s inability to reverse the production slide will have far-reaching consequences for the national budget, job creation, and foreign exchange stability, since petroleum revenues are critical for funding key infrastructure and stabilizing the cedi.
The decline, he said, has already halved government revenue inflows and weakened the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation’s (GNPC) ability to carry out its mandate effectively.
Experts say Ghana’s oil fields, once seen as the new frontier of West African energy, are now stagnating due to aging infrastructure, delayed field development, and limited exploration activity.
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This has scared off investors who once viewed Ghana as a regional model for petroleum governance.
To avert the total collapse of the sector, Benjamin Nsiah believes only a multi-sectoral technical taskforce that will bring together stakeholders from energy, finance, environment, and private investment can map out a realistic strategy for reviving output and restoring investor confidence.
“We need to set up as a country by maybe building a stakeholder team, a technical team, to look at why we are not attracting the industry investment, and why we think that GNPC should be funded to operate efficiently and get us more of the output we need for upward adjustment of the outputs we’ve been seeing over the years,” Benjamin Nsiah noted in an interview monitored by The High Street Journal.
Without urgent steps to address the situation, Ghana’s upstream petroleum sector hangs in the balance. Industry watchers such as the Executive Director of CEMSE agree that Ghana’s future energy security hinges on urgent and swift coordinated actions to salvage the situation.
