The Ghana-Côte D’Ivoire oil dispute

Although the maritime boundary dispute between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire had existed for a long time, it was reignited around 2010 -- the year Ghana started commercial production of oil.

Cote d’Ivoire has been claiming ownership of the billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of gas reserves reportedly found in the deep waters near Ghana’s coast.

 In 2011, the Ivorian authorities -- at the time still under the leadership of former president Laurent Gbagbo -- published a map with a new order, claiming portions of Ghanaian oil blocks.

Seismic data from the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), the regulator of the country’s upstream petroleum sector, show that the disputed area covers portions of the Jubilee Field, Tweneboa, Enyenra, the Owo discoveries, West Tano-1X find and the deep-water Tano block, all found in the west coast of Ghana’s territorial waters. GNPC has already allocated some of those blocks to some oil companies, including Tullow and Kosmos, to explore and develop for commercial oil production.

According to officials of the GNPC, the claims of ownership of some the country’s oil fields by neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire do not have merit and will not disturb the country’s oil production in any way.

 “The boundaries between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have been very clear and undisputed, and any new claims to the contrary will have to be proven with facts,” the Chief Executive Officer of the GNPC, Nana Boakye Asafu-Adjaye, said at a news conference in Accra. Kosmos Energy’s largest stake in the country’s deep-water Tano discovery is located in the disputed area, according to the Communications Manager of Kosmos Ghana, Mrs. Ruth Adashie.

Thus, with Côte d’Ivoire still pushing its ownership claim, indications are that Kosmos will perhaps be distracted from continuing to work on its blocks. But Mrs. Adashie said:

“The dispute has not affected our work at all; if it had we would have laid down our tools and waited to see what the government would say, but that is not the case.”

 She explained that once the International Criminal Court (ICC) has not put an injunction on Ghana, it means Ghana still owns that portion of the sea and Kosmos has no cause to worry.

 Nevertheless, both governments of the two countries have enjoyed cordial relations for a long time and are keen to solve the matter peacefully.

 Possibly, Ghana could expect to rake in an extra eight billion barrels of petroleum reserves if it succeeds in getting its maritime boundaries extended.

 Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Mike Allen Hammah, disclosed that it has already put in an application to the UN’s International Seabed Authority for the extension of the continental shelf and that the country expects a good chance of success.

“The prospects are high for Ghana’s request to be granted, and we are working round the clock to have this done,” he stated.

 Ghana seeks the extension of its continental shelf to about 15,000 square kilometers beyond 200 nautical miles, where preliminary studies have shown the potential for at least eight billion barrels of petroleum reserves. Ghana is among 50 countries globally that have sought expansion of their territorial waters.

The others include Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire and Kenya. The Jubilee Field is estimated to contain three billion barrels of oil reserves. Other neighbouring countries are in conflict over oil boundaries, writes Toyin Akinosho in africa oil+gas report.

The concluded court battle between Cross River State and Akwa Ibom States in Nigeria's south-south area of 76 oil wells had run for six years. Both states had laid claim to the same oil wells.

The Cross River State is responsible for perhaps the most prolific segment of the Niger Delta basin: four companies -- namely ExxonMobil, TOTAL, NPDC and Addax -- produce over 1million barrels of oil per day in the southeast offshore corner of the Niger Delta, which is roughly one-tenth of the basin.

That same southeast corner is where the main oil production in Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon comes from.

 The same petroleum system spawned what has so far been discovered in the Joint Development Zone (JDZ) between Nigeria and Sao Tomé et Principé (STP). But geology is not a respecter of political boundaries.

That is why countries which share boundaries with hydrocarbon-rich countries are quite often resource-poor themselves -- and they are always complaining they have been cheated.

Somalia and Kenya never had a public spat over boundaries until recently, when Kenya became a magnet for exploration companies and encountered its first commercial pool of oil. Now the two sides are bickering.

The Somali government, ordinarily concerned with keeping terrorists at bay in its war-weary cities, now has a new cause to fight.

It accuses Kenya of awarding offshore oil and gas blocks illegally to TOTAL and Eni, French and Italian oil majors respectively, claiming that the blocks lie in Somali waters.

Just a few days before the Supreme Court in Nigeria ruled that Cross River was not a littoral state, Somali deputy energy minister Abdullahi Dool claimed that L21, 22, 23, and 24 -- the four deepwater blocks awarded to TOTAL and Eni -- were invalid and that his country will take the matter to the United Nations.

Kenya has so far rejected the Somali claims to the area. Although the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding in 2009, which stated that the border should run east along the line of latitude, Somalia rejected the agreement.

The contention between Kenya and Somalia is about acreages in the Lamu Basin, right in the Indian Ocean -- the vast seaway that bounds the African continent in the east.

In the same waters, international oil companies have within two years discovered by their own submission over 100 trillion cubic feet of gas, more than half of Nigeria’s gas reserves, off Mozambique and Tanzania.

And, this is the point about “the trickster god of geology” again: the discoveries in Tanzania have been a fraction of the finds in Mozambique -- even though the assets in question lie in the same Ruvuma Basin and the acreages are quite close to one another.

Tanzania has vowed to get as lucky as Mozambique and is planning a bid-round to award acreages which have “similar geologic features to the richly-endowed tracts of Mozambique”.

 The Democratic Republic of Congo is battling two oil-rich neighbours to the east and west. Some of the most prospective but undrilled structures in the DRC lie along the same trend in the Albertine basin as the reservoirs where Tullow Oil has reported estimates of a billion barrels of oil in several fields in Uganda. Congolese and Ugandan troops have clashed several times in this area.

In Uganda’s Hoima district, Heritage -- the London-listed operator -- constructed a school in memory of Carl Nedft, the British geologist who was slain in a pre-dawn raid on workers by Congolese troops in August 2007.

To the west, DRC has long accused Angola of “stealing” oil from offshore wells near its coast --thought to be a reference to operations in the Cabinda enclave which is surrounded by DR Congo and Congo Brazaville.

In early 2010, Angola’s National Assembly agreed to open talks with the DR Congo on the extension of its border out to 350 nautical miles, rather than 200 miles, as a prelude to an application to the UN for recognition of that boundary. Relations between the countries deteriorated sharply in 2011 after a series of disputes.

 A report in a July 2012 edition of Journal De Angola notes that the Angolan Cabinet in Luanda “analysed a number of treaties between Angola and Congo on joint exploration of oil in the Lianzi development area concerning the share of revenues, customs and migratory matters”.

 It may be a way of saying that the issues are finally getting to resolution.

The clash between Sudan and South Sudan has shown that the more battle-hardened the neighbours are, however, the more difficult it is to reach a solution around boundaries.

 In January 2012, Salva Kiir, the president of South Sudan, took the decision to shut down oil-producing facilities and thus cut off revenue to both Sudan and his own government. It’s an unusual course of action for an African head of state.

When South Sudan became independent of Sudan in July 2011, it inherited over 90% of the crude oil reserves and production which were, until 2005, entirely under the control of Khartoum.

 Even though most of the fields are located in South Sudan, the processing, storage and evacuation facilities are sited in Sudan, and revenues from these resources had been shared equally in the seven years since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that granted autonomy to the South.

The one African leader who has dealt upfront with the issue of hydrocarbon-prone maritime boundaries has been Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of Nigeria.

 He “settled” disputes which had long lingered before his tenure with Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tomé et Principé and Cameroon.

And his solutions were such that Nigeria, playing the big brother, gave out more territory to these less-endowed neighbours. In coming to a resolution with Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria surrendered a chunk of the Zafiro field, which currently produces 140,000 barrels of oil per day.

 And it was in the process of giving up the Bakassi Peninsula that Cross River lost “its coastline”.

 But in going to court to get an alternative to its probable loss of oil revenue accruing from Bakassi, Cross River could have asked itself: how much oil, really, is in that peninsula?

The answer, really, is not much, if any. Cameroon itself, in total, is producing just about 60,000 bopd.

And if indeed there was some commercial pool of hydrocarbon in Bakassi, it would most likely have made Cross River the least-endowed of the fringe Niger Delta states, like Edo and Ondo.