The Public Interest and Accountability (PIAC) has dismissed the perception that foreign oil-producing companies are shunning investments in Ghana because of the energy transition policies by their respective governments.

This is coming on the back of reduced oil production since production started in 2013.

The government has in recent times struggled to attract investments into the upstream petroleum sector.

Speaking to Joy Business, Technical Manager at PIAC, Mark Agyemang, said the government should speed up good quality data acquisitions in order to attract foreign firms that have the capacity to explore oil in Ghana.

“I don’t think the resources are under threat, as we clearly stated this energy transition thing is not a one-day thing. It is going to take years, about the next 50 years”.

What we have to do as a country is speed up in a very efficient and sustainable way our data acquisition. It is not just data acquisition but quality data acquisition in order to contract investors. These oil companies that we are saying are shying away from petroleum activities because of the energy transition, it is not entirely true”, he mentioned.

According to Mr. Agyemang, the Western oil-producing firms are diversifying their portfolios in order to align to their energy transition policies in the future.

“They are diversifying their portfolio because the Western stakeholders especially are on them. Most of these green energy components are shareholders so they’re mostly asking them to diversify gradually till probably they become full green companies”.

To him, if Ghana gets good data and increases its block sizes “and we go for a second licensing we will get companies to come”.

He concluded that “the reason why the first licensing was not successful as we would all have wanted was because the quality of data was so low”.