Business
Ghana’s gas processing plant at the end of the rainbow
Leveraging oil assets
Terkper says the decision to use a Chinese contractor, which would allow the government to draw on a $3 billion credit it negotiated with the China Development Bank, was based on financial realities. “We spoke to several private-sector contractors, and they all demanded a sovereign guarantee for the finance,” he says.
Such a guarantee would have breached the debt ceiling imposed by the IMF after Ghana was reclassified as a lower middle-income country. Instead, Sinopec is being paid indirectly out of Ghana’s oil exports through a complex system that Terkper insists is far more accountable than conventional counter-trade deals: “We are leveraging the value of our oil assets, not collateralizing them.”
On 10 March, the GNPC’s Mould announced the main engineering and mechanical work on the gas plant would be finished by the end of the month, and that the full commissioning of the system would take another three months. If he’s right and the gas starts to fuel the power stations, this could be the beginning of a much-needed turnaround in Ghana’s energy industry.
