Ghana's local partner for ExxonMobil's deep-water Cape Three Points project, the Ghana Oil Company Limited (GOIL) is searching for a new exploration partner for the abandoned project.

According to the oil marketing firm, it is still interested in the oil field despite the move by the main exploration firm to pull out.

ExxonMobil abandoned the field last month due to some risk factors and concerns over the ability of the field to produce to meet expectations.

GOIL was chosen as the local partner for the American exploration firm with 5% interest after a thorough vetting process to work on the deep water Cape Three Points project, which is expected to produce some large volumes of crude.

After a careful assessment, ExxonMobil announced to the government of its intentions to forego the field due to some reasons including its high risk nature.

Chief Operations officer for GOIL, Alex Adzew told shareholders at its 52 Annual General Meeting, that GOIL had engaged the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, GNPC to get new partners.

According to him, it has no option than to accept the decision by ExxonMobil since this will not distract its investments.

“With such activities, you do the seismic and interpret the data but there’s a risk that every company will put in such explorations. ExxonMobil felt that there was no need to drill further to find oil because the risk on this particular one is high”.

“What we have done as a company is to continue to explore and look for partners who will partner us to even come in and the prospects might even be different so this is the plan we have taken as a business” he said.

Meanwhile, GOIL has maintained a dividend of 0.045 per share with respect to the 2020 financial year. This is the same amount paid to the shareholders in 2019.

It comes despite a decline in profit by more than 14% in 2020.

According to the Board Chairman, Kwamena Barterls, the loss is due to the adverse effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on its operations.