Imagine that Nigeria’s oil wells dry up. Imagine that the tens of thousands of litres of Gas supply from Nigeria to her West African neighbor, Ghana on daily basis ceases to work. Sure, that will have a huge ripple effect on Ghana’s electricity supply and by extension its economy.
That is about what is happening already. Ghana’s Minister of Power (state), John Jinapor, heads of Volta River Authority (VRA) and Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) were in Ivory Coast last week to negotiate with the country to begin to supply extra power to her to meet national demand. The reason is understandable. Ghana is currently experiencing electricity deficit created by the reduction in gas supply from Nigeria and shut down of FPSO Kwame Nkrumah.
While Nigeria is still battling with incessant or epileptic power supply, the situation is slightly different for Ghana. The good thing is that the trip is already yielding result for Ghana. Engineer Isaac Kirk Koffi, the Chief Executive Officer of VRA, said Ivory Coast expressed willingness to help Ghana at least for the next two weeks after the talks, according to Ghana’s TV3. “Over the weekend, they were able to give us enough and weekdays [during off peak hours] but reduce it at peak hours,” Koff said.
However, there were fears that the country may soon be plunged into serious black out after GRIDCo announced the shutdown of the floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) at the Jubilee Fields and the damage to the West African gas pipelines in Nigeria. “We have made adequate preparations to buy crude oil.
We got almost a million barrels. We have discharged 300,000 barrels for our plants in Tema and we are on our way to discharge 400,000 barrels for our plants in Takoradi [and] the extra 200,000 will be discharged again in Tema,” Koffi said while dismissing fears.
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