Ghana: No Cash for Gas Project

Ghanaians would have to wait much longer for gas to flow from the much-publicised Ghana Gas Project being constructed at Atuabu, in the Ellembele District of the Western Region. Though the project was expected to have been completed last year, the project is at a standstill.
As you read this piece, Sinopec, the Chinese petrochemical company constructing the US$700 million gas project, is threatening to abandon the project and head for home if the Government of Ghana fails to honour its financial obligation to it.
The gas project, a flagship project of the Mills-Mahama administration, intended to help solve the perennial power shortage and its attendant outages, has been bedeviled with serious financial constraints, as a result of the failure of the Government of Ghana to honour its financial commitments to the company.
The project was expected to be completed last year. But financial and other constraints extended the project completion date.
The authorities say the project is only about 60 percent complete so far, largely due to financial constraints, according to senior officials of the state-owned Ghana Company Limited, under whose auspices the project is being constructed.
The Chief Executive of Ghana Gas Company, Dr. George Sipa Yankey, told Joy FM, an Accra-based radio station, that the Ghana Gas Company has been continuously pleading with Sinopec not to abandon the project.
He said the Government of Ghana had sent a delegation to China to discuss the issue with the China Development Bank (CDB), which is financing the project. The project, when completed, will provide gas for power generation, as well as domestic use.
The plant will enable safe commercial delivery of processed gas from Atuabo to the Aboadze-based Takoradi Thermal Processing Plant (TTPP). It will also facilitate the transport of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) from the same site to Domunli, for onward evacuation to Accra by sea-going vessels.
The source of the gas is expected to be the Jubilee Oil Fields in the Western Region. An onshore pipeline is programmed to carry the gas, first to the processing plant a few metres off the coast, and then to the power plant at Aboadze.
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