Ghana’s second Floating Production Storage Offloading (FPSO) vessel will start production in the second half of the year, President John Mahama has announced.

FPSO Atta Mills arrived in the country in March this year after successfully completing a five-week voyage from Singapore where it was built.

President Mahama delivering the May Day address in Wa in the Upper West region said the 350-meter vessel will start producing oil from the Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN) offshore oil fields in the second half of this year.

The development of the TEN oil fields, located around 60 kilometers from the coast of Ghana’s Western Region, is being led by Tullow Oil together with its partners Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Kosmos Energy, PetroSA and the state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).

The new FPSO vessel cost 750 million dollars.

It can store 1.6 million barrels of oil and has a production capacity of 120,000 barrels of oil per day.

Ghana’s first FPSO vessel, the Kwame Nkrumah, has been in operation since 2010.