Total petroleum receipts for the first half of 2023 have dropped by 26.1 percent from the US$731.9million recorded at the end of June 2022 to US$540.4million, according to the latest Ghana Petroleum Funds report by the Bank of Ghana (BoG).

The report, released per Section 28 of the Petroleum Revenue Management Act (PRMA), 2011 (Act 815), indicates that a total of US$102.3million out of the amount earned has been allocated to the Ghana Heritage Fund (GHF) and Ghana Stabilisation Fund (GSF) respectively. This comprised a sum of US$30.7million that went to the GHF and US$71.6million to the GSF.

The latest Ghana Petroleum Fund report also shows that a total of US$370.5million was received as proceeds from the 69th, 70th and 71st listings of Jubilee Field and the 12th lifting of the Sankofa Gye Nyame (SGN) Field, and the 22nd lifting of the Tweneboa, Enyenra, Ntomme (TEN) Fields.

The total petroleum receipts consist of proceeds from oil liftings, corporate tax and surface rental, as well as interest on the Petroleum Fund account.

To this end, earnings from oil production amounted to US$370million while corporate tax contributed US$166million, with surface rental totalling US$3million.

This comes after the country earned an amount of US$1.42billion as oil revenue for 2022 – the highest since commercial production began in 2011, despite recording a 5.98 percent drop in production volumes at the end of 2022.

The last year’s earnings, which was contained in the 2022 Annual Report of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), represents an 82.3 percent increase in revenue from the US$783.32million recorded in 2021 from crude oil production of 55,050,391 barrels (bbls).

The huge increase in petroleum receipts at the time was attributed to a surge in benchmark price of the commodity on the international market, which closed at about US$68.17 per barrel in 2021 but reached US$100 per barrel by end of 2022 on the global market.