The Executive Vice-President of Tullow Ghana, Mr Kweku Awotwi, has said the company is currently in active discussions with the Government of Ghana over new opportunities for Tullow to expand its production.

He explained that there were more opportunities for the company to expand its production base in Ghana and the company would continue to explore that.

He told journalists a two-day media training programme organized by Tullow Ghana, in collaboration with the Rigworld Training Centre that: “When you look at Jubilee and the Tweneboa Enyera and Ntomme (TEN) Fields, we have over a billion barrels of resources that we now have to bring into reserve, so there is a lot of opportunity.

“There are a number of areas within what we call our development and producing area (DPA) that we do not have rights to, so we are actually in active discussions with the government on how we can bring them on through the things we are doing. Even within the Plan of Development (PoD) that was approved long ago, there are other targets,” he said.

Touching on the performance of the company, Mr Awotwi said performance in exploration had slowly been stabilising over time.

“I think the idea is to be able to increase that even further. I think the idea really is to continually look for improvement and that is what it is. This year we expect to do better than last year,” he said.

He also mentioned that Tullow Ghana had committed US$10 million over the next five years to support the building of infrastructure as part of the government’s flagship Free Senior High School (SHS) programme.

“We have already identified up to 20 schools across the country, probably a lot of them are in the Western Region for obvious reasons, but we have made sure that there are schools in every single region of the country that we will support.

The training workshop was to help build the capacity of the media to be able to understand issues and effectively report on happenings in the sector. It was also to help build capacity to effectively interrogate issues in the oil and gas industry.

“We recognise that the oil and gas industry is quite young, and quite technical; but the more people like yourself understand the business, ask questions and appreciate the complexities of the business, the more we think we can have a better conversation about oil and gas and the industry,” he said.