The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gas Company, Dr. George Sipa Yankey has indicated that all things being equal, commercial production of gas will commence somewhere September, this year.

Dr. Yankey told Joy News Thursday that “Ghana Gas – we have finished; once gas gets into our plants today; we are ready to operate the plant. But gas won’t get into our plant until Tullow has tied our pipelines system to their FPSO and they are in-charge of that operation.” 

The Chief Executive added that “When you get the first gas depends on when the tie-in of pipeline system is successfully tied to the FPSO. This is an engineering work and if there is a problem, we at Ghana Gas are more concerned about the safety and integrity of our plant and our people.”

Although the Ghana Gas is involved in the entire exercise, he explained, Tullow Oil and its partners decided to handle the engineering aspect themselves due to the sensitive nature of their equipment.

Officials of the company announced to the Vice President Paa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur, who was on a working visit to the processing plant at Atuabo in the Western region Wednesday that, it was 99 per cent complete.

Meanwhile, the poor road networks in the area are also receiving some construction works.

Dr. Yankey said a Chinese company, TICO, has been contracted to construct a 10-kilometer road to the Gas processing plant. He continued the road would be parallel to the pipeline.

However, Dr. Yankey did not anticipate the road construction would be completed anytime soon but other alternatives have been put in place.

Media reports mentioned that some GHȼ8 million had so far been paid as compensation to farmers whose crops were affected by the construction of the gas plant.

The Daily Graphic reported in June that a Sekondi High Court overturned its earlier ruling, which restrained the Ghana National Gas Company (Ghana Gas) and four others from carrying on with activities on the land on which the company operates until Ghana Gas regularizes its occupation with the Eastern Nzema Traditional Council.

That was after the court had upheld an application for a variation of its decision filed by Ghana Gas.

The court, presided over by Mr Justice Kofi Akrowia had, on Monday, June 9, 2014, restrained the defendants from carrying on work at the project site for a period of 14 days, within which Ghana Gas was to contact the chiefs and the people of the traditional area to regularize its stay on the land.

The other defendants in the substantive case are SINOPEC, the Chinese construction firm working on the Atuabo Gas Project, Quantum Terminals Limited, the Ghana Oil Company (GOIL) and Ernest Nunoo, owner of the Ernest Seafront Hotel.