Tullow is considering three options on the table to fix the broken turret bearing of jubilee floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel - FPSO Kwame Nkrumah, before resuming full operation, a company official has said.

The company shut down operations in March this year after it noticed a broken turret bearing on the vessel following planned routine maintenance works but has started production after stabilising the vessel.

“Fixing the problem itself in terms of the bearing, we did say that we are looking to come to a decision on the option to select by the middle of the year,” Mr Charles Darku, General Manager for Ghana Business Unit at Tullow Oil plc, said on Wednesday.

“It could be one of three options that we discussed, it could be an off-station solution, a spread moor solution and another one,” he said.

“We will have discussions with the Government of Ghana, our partners and all other stakeholders to [reach a] decision for that activity to take place.”

Mr Darku, who announced this to shareholders at the Company’s fifth investor forum, said the company had initiated steps to stabilise the national asset and allow full production of oil.

Tullow says it would produce 33,000 barrels of oil per day as against the 100,000 it was producing before the planned shutdown.

“We’re planning the shutdown for maintenance and this occurred so we went through the shutdown which was the planned maintenance activities which we have completed.”

“We used that time and sometime after that to consolidate the procedures that we require to be able to off-take the cargo that was on-board the FPSO and start production”, Mr Darku said.

The investor forum enabled Tullow oil to present to its shareholders in Ghana the company’s 2015 performance and outlook for 2016.

Tullow Oil could not pay dividends to its shareholders, following a drop in world crude oil prices since mid-2014, the company recorded robust performance in 2015 registering average gross production of 103,000 barrels per day.

However, first quarter of 2016 production was below expectations due to increased downtime following the concern identified with the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah turret bearing.

The Tweneboa, Enyenra and Ntomme (TEN) project is now over 90 per cent complete and first oil remains on target for July/August 2016, Tullow said.

The company estimates that TEN average annual production in 2016 would be around 23,000 bopd gross.

It attribute the result its mid-year start-up and ramp-up in the second half.