Deputy Energy Minister Dr Mohammed Amin Adam has said the former President John Mahama lacked what it takes to develop the oil and gas industry as the latter’s administration lacked the plans to strategically utilise some of the facilities at their disposal.
According to the Deputy Minister, the Atuabo Gas Plant built under the erstwhile government in the Western Region was cited too far from the country’s hub for processing power, Tema making it difficult for the project to see it’s full usage.
He made these comments when he spoke to Evans Mensah on PM Express June 1.
Dr Amin Adam explained that the failure to establish a transport mechanism for the product between the power plant and the industries that require the services was unproductive.
He said the intervention of President Akufo-Addo following his assumption of office was the needed twist to give a boost to the maximization of the plant’s potential.
“What was problematic about it was what I call the failure of planning. The then-government to have realised that we have most of our power processing plants in Tema in the eastern part of Ghana but there was no project to link the processing plant through a pipeline to where the power plants are. So even at the time we had ‘dumsor’, because Nigeria had curtailed the supply of gas to us, we had so much of our indigenous gas stranded in Takoradi. This was the failure of planning.
He further explained that the funding necessary to build a system to transport gas to Tema was spearheaded by the incumbent NPP government, a feat that brought out the usefulness of the Atuabo Gas Plant.
“Today as I speak to you, President Akufo-Addo has delivered the first phase of the Gas Reverse project which now allows us to flow up to 60 million standard cubic feet of gas a day from Takoradi to Tema,” he told JoyNews.
Dr Amin Adam emphasised that “it took us to amend the plan of development on the OCTP project and to request that savings made from the project be used to deliver on that project… In fact, the plan to do that did not come from the NDC, it came from the Word Bank.”
This among other developments, including the relocation of the Karpowership, Dr Adam believes, places President Akufo-Addo over John Mahama in the oil and gas management space.
