The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) says it has identified potential stranded resources of more than one billion barrels of oil and 2.5 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Tano Basin.

The Corporation says the resources could help boost Ghana’s declining petroleum production if existing infrastructure is leveraged to develop them commercially.

Senior Geomatic Engineer at GNPC, Emmanuel Boadum Donkor, said spatial data analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was helping the Corporation identify ways to connect stranded resources to existing petroleum infrastructure and reduce development costs.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Esri User Conference West Africa 2026, hosted by Sambus Geospatial Limited, Mr Donkor said the analysis had so far focused on the Tano Basin.

“With only the Tano Basin that we have done the analysis around, we have been able to identify over 1 billion barrels of oil that we can actually potentially add to our production rate and about 2.5 trillion cubic feet of gas that we can actually add to our current production to boost it,” he said in a Citi FM interview.

Hub approach to reduce development costs

Mr Donkor explained that developing the stranded resources as separate projects could require significant capital investment.

He said a hub-based approach, in which several resources are connected to existing infrastructure, could lower development costs and improve their commercial viability.

“If you take up the CAPEX in terms of developing the infrastructure to extract these stranded resources independently, if you compare it to doing it in the hub way which we are seeking to do, you realise that it brings down the cost of investment and then it actually boosts our confidence to be able to extract these stranded resources,” he said.

The approach would allow GNPC to leverage infrastructure already in place rather than developing separate facilities for individual stranded resources.

GIS supporting petroleum planning

Mr Donkor said GIS had become an important decision-support tool for GNPC, particularly because a significant proportion of the Corporation’s data was location-based.

“At GNPC it is a very significant part of us, as our data contains about 80% location information, and that tells you how significant positioning is to our industry,” he said.

He explained that GIS could combine information on wells, pipelines, roads, settlements, farms and environmentally sensitive areas to support decisions on petroleum infrastructure development while helping to minimise potential environmental and social impacts.

According to him, the technology therefore provides GNPC with a clearer picture of how existing infrastructure can be integrated with stranded resources.

Implementation

Mr Donkor said the next phase would depend on reaching agreement on how the identified opportunities could be developed.

He stressed that the resources identified through the analysis represented potential additions to production and would require the necessary investment and development arrangements before they could contribute to Ghana’s petroleum output.