The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), says it would continue to partner with communities as it seeks to harness the country's petroleum resources for national development.

“We are committed to working in partnership with the people in the communities where we operate and we deem engaging them important in an effort to take on board their concerns and assure them of our commitment to addressing them,” said Mr Alexander Mould, Acting Chief Executive of GNPC.

A statement issued in Accra and copied to Ghana News Agency on Tuesday after a team from the national oil company concluded a six-week public community engagement, said GNPC undertook the community engagements across 23 metropolitan, municipal, and district areas , as part of the process towards using a scientific process to acquire information about the structure of rocks in certain areas (2D Seismic Data acquisition).

It said this was to enable the Corporation to ascertain their (the communities) potential for containing oil and gas.

The areas form part of the Voltaian Basin, a large onshore area of the country with rocks that have the characteristics of those that produce oil and gas.

The engagements which started in the Mion District on Monday, June 22, had a GNPC team briefing the communities about the scope of the upcoming project, processes involved, its potential impact as well as mitigation options available to address them.

The engagement was carried out with the representatives of other state agencies, including the upstream petroleum sector regulator, the Petroleum Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and security agencies.

The statement said stakeholders such as metropolitan, municipal; district chief executives and their co-ordinating directors, land and property owners, traditional leaders, community leaders, family and clan heads, as well as non-governmental organisations operating in the various areas, all took part in the deliberations.

The districts covered included: Mion, West Mamprusi, Savelugu-Nanton, Nanumba-South, Nanumba North, Yendi Municipality, East Mamprusi, Mamprugu-Moaduri, Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo, Tamale Metro, Karaga, Gushiegu, Central Gonja and East Gonja, all in the Northern Region.

The rest are: Pru, Sene East, Kintampo and Atebubu-Amantin, in Brong-Ahafo Region; Agogo, Ejura-Sekyidumase, and Sekyere Central in the Ashanti Region; as well as Afram Plains North and South districts in the Eastern Region.

The Voltaian Basin is the largest but least-explored part of the country’s four sedimentary basins; measuring 103,600 sq. km (covers about 40 per cent of Ghana’s landmass).

GNPC has plans to gather seismic data to determine the petroleum potential of the basin.

Seismic data acquisition is the process of acquiring images of underground geological structures and their attributes to determine their potential for holding petroleum.