Professor Joe Amoako-Tuffour, a secretary to government’s Economic Management Team has disclosed that Ghana has in the past five years not made any new significant discovery in oil exploration.

According to him, the country is currently dependent only on its TEN, Jubilee and Sankofa fields for oil exploration.

Making the disclosure at the tenth anniversary event of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC); Prof. Joe Amoako-Tuffour said the state of Ghana’s lag in oil discovery demands stringent measures should the country intend to be a major oil producer.

“The future of the industry itself is at stake and so is the future of the national oil company, GNPC. We are in an era of turbulent oil crisis environment, a shift to renewables, the threat of climate change and the risk that we would have stranded access deep under the ocean. Our going forward depends on three things: the geology that we have, the physical attractiveness of sharing, the regulatory attractiveness of who gets to access the resource.

“Right now, for the first ten years much of our work, if not all have been in shallow waters, that is in waters 2000 meters below. Our future depends on our capacity to be able to explore in those deep waters. It's expensive and very few oil companies would dare go into those deep waters. As we are growing, our industry ten years down the road will depend on how well we can explore deep waters,” he said.

Prof Tuffour urged more deep water exploration in order for the country not to exhaust its hydrocarbons in the next decade.

“We have to be confident to explore, because if we don’t explore, we won’t have oil. So it’s all hands on deck to make sure that we do more exploration into deep waters; otherwise, we will have all our oil stranded underground,” he advised.

Meanwhile, a policy think tank, Civil Society Platform on Oil and Gas has warned of an imminent collapse of the country’s petroleum industry due to a lack of new oil discovery.