Ghana

Ghana's Oil in Brief

Ghana, on West Africa's Gulf of Guinea coast between Ivory Coast and Togo, became an oil producer in December 2010, when the Jubilee field came on stream 60 km offshore. Fifteen years later it produces from three offshore hubs, Jubilee, TEN (Tweneboa, Enyenra, Ntomme) and Sankofa, and its story is the opposite of the Atlantic margin's famous growth story next door in Guyana: not a staircase up, but a peak, a long decline, and now a deliberate fight back with the drill bit.

The numbers frame it. Ghana produced 48.24 million barrels of crude oil in 2024, about 132,000 barrels per day, from the three fields, according to the Public Interest and Accountability Committee's (PIAC) 2024 annual report on petroleum revenue management, published in the Ministry of Finance's annual petroleum report (checked November 8, 2026). That was nearly flat against 48.25 million barrels in 2023, but it is a third below the 71.44 million barrel peak of 2019, about 195,700 b/d. The first half of 2025 was worse: 18.42 million barrels, down 25.9% year on year, as shutdowns and natural decline hit all three fields. Then the revival began. New Jubilee wells drilled in the 2025-26 campaign lifted gross Jubilee output to 70,800 b/d in the first half of 2026, operator Tullow Oil reported in September 2026, and the government extended the Jubilee and TEN licences to 2040. For market context, Ghana's barrels are a small slice of world supply, but its gas matters at home: the Offshore Cape Three Points (OCTP) project supplies about 70% of Ghana's domestic gas, mostly for power generation. Readers can follow the price context in Brent and WTI coverage, and in the Baker Hughes rig count explainer.

Discovery: How Jubilee Changed the Basin

Ghana's oil history before 2007 was a series of small onshore and shallow-water finds that never became commercial. The change came in June 2007, when Kosmos Energy drilled the Mahogany-1 exploration well in the Deepwater Tano block, about 63 km offshore, and found high-quality oil in Turonian-aged sands. The Jubilee field, straddling the Deepwater Tano and West Cape Three Points blocks, was confirmed by appraisal wells and developed fast: first oil flowed in December 2010 from the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah at initial rates above 120,000 b/d, according to the field's operating history.

The discovery set off the only exploration success Ghana has had. Tullow Oil announced the Tweneboa discovery in March 2009, about 25 km west of Jubilee, which became the TEN project and came online in August 2016. Eni's Sankofa and Gye Nyame fields in the Offshore Cape Three Points block added oil from May 2017 and gas from 2018. No new producing field has been found since, which is why the 2024 production total is dominated by a field discovered 17 years ago, and why the 2025-26 drilling campaign matters so much.

The Three Fields

All of Ghana's production comes from three offshore hubs in the Tano and Cape Three Points basins. The table uses PIAC's 2024 annual report for volumes, Tullow's trading statement and half-year results for 2025 and 2026 rates, and Eni's project pages for OCTP.

Field	Operator and partners	First oil	FPSO	2024 production	2025-2026 status
Jubilee	Tullow (38.98%, operator), Kosmos (38.61%), GNPC (19.69%), PetroSA (2.72%)	December 2010	Kwame Nkrumah	31.85 million bbl (66% of national output)	Gross 60,900 b/d in 2025; 70,800 b/d in H1 2026 after six new producer wells
TEN (Tweneboa, Enyenra, Ntomme)	Tullow (operator) with Kosmos, GNPC and PetroSA	August 2016	Prof. John Evans Atta Mills	6.78 million bbl (14%)	Gross 16,000 b/d in 2025; 14,800 b/d in H1 2026
Sankofa (OCTP)	Eni (44.4%, operator), Vitol (35.6%), GNPC (20%)	May 2017 (oil); gas from 2018	John Agyekum Kufuor	9.61 million bbl (20%)	Gas capacity raised to 270 MMcf/d in July 2025; $600 million upgrade to 355 MMcf/d by Q1 2028

Sources: PIAC 2024 Annual Report on petroleum revenue management; Tullow Oil trading statement (2025 full year) and 2026 half-year results; Eni OCTP project page; Oil and Gas Journal, August 11, 2025.

Jubilee is the field that decides Ghana's production. It produced about 75,000 b/d in 2021 and about 89,000 b/d in October 2024, and its decline has been driven by maturing reservoirs, water cut in older wells, and the FPSO turret problems of the early 2020s. The 2025-26 campaign is the response: six producer wells and one water injector, drilled by the Noble Venturer, with the J72-P well onstream in July 2025, J74-P onstream on January 6, 2026 at about 13,000 b/d initial gross rate, and the campaign completed in September 2026. Tullow reported FPSO uptime above 99% in the first half of 2026, and the field's gross rate rose from about 59,000 b/d in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 70,800 b/d in the first half of 2026.

TEN is the smallest of the three and the most questioned on economics: PIAC's 2024 report noted its low production against substantially high production and development costs. Its gross output of 16,000 b/d in 2025 was above expectations, helped by zonal optimisation at Enyenra and water injection work. Sankofa is the gas field that happens to produce oil: its 9.61 million barrels in 2024 were about a fifth of national output, but its gas is the larger story, covered below.

The Production Curve

Ghana's production history is a rise, a peak, and a five-year slide that the 2026 drilling campaign is trying to reverse.

Year	Crude production	Note
2010	About 9,000 b/d	First oil from Jubilee in December
2015	About 107,000 b/d	Jubilee ramped; Saltpond still produced about 110 b/d
2019	71.44 million bbl (about 195,700 b/d)	Peak year
2021	About 150,000 b/d	Jubilee about 75,000 b/d; TEN and Sankofa contributing
2023	48.25 million bbl	Fifth consecutive annual decline begins to flatten
2024	48.24 million bbl (about 132,000 b/d)	Jubilee 31.85M, Sankofa 9.61M, TEN 6.78M bbl
H1 2025	18.42 million bbl	Down 25.9% year on year on shutdowns and decline
2025 (full year)	About 104,000 b/d	Energy Intelligence estimate, November 2026
Q1 2026	112,000 b/d	Energy Intelligence; new Jubilee wells and higher Sankofa output

Sources: EIA Ghana country page (August 2016 analysis) for 2010-2015; PIAC 2024 annual report and 2025 semi-annual report for 2019-2025; Energy Intelligence Ghana country profile, November 2, 2026, for 2025 and Q1 2026. Cumulative production from 2010 to 2024 totals 656.68 million barrels, per PIAC.

Worked example: checking the 2024 average

PIAC reports 48.24 million barrels in 2024. 2024 was a leap year, so 48,240,000 divided by 366 days is about 131,800 b/d. This page uses the PIAC figure, rounded to 132,000 b/d, wherever it quotes 2024 output; other published estimates for 2024 are built on different bases and are not mixed in. The direction is clear on the PIAC numbers alone: 2024 output was about a third below the 2019 peak of about 195,700 b/d.

Worked example: how long do the reserves last?

Proved crude reserves are about 660 million barrels, according to the EIA's 2025 figures. At the 2024 production rate of 48.24 million barrels a year, that is 660 divided by 48.24, or about 13.7 years of production. Proved and probable reserves (2P) were about 732 million barrels at the end of 2023, according to Petroleum Commission data, which would stretch the same arithmetic to about 15 years. Energy Intelligence, on a broader definition that includes contingent resources, puts total reserves at 2.1 billion barrels. The three numbers describe different categories, not different facts: proved reserves are the barrels that are highly certain to be recoverable, 2P adds probable barrels, and the broadest figure includes volumes that are not yet commercial. Any claim about Ghana "running out of oil" in a fixed year should say which category it uses.

Gas: the Other Half of the Story

Ghana's oil gets the headlines, but its gas decides whether the lights stay on. The country exported 115,454.51 million standard cubic feet of gas in 2024, about 316 MMcf/d on average, according to the Ministry of Finance's annual petroleum report, and domestic gas is the main fuel for thermal power generation.

The gas system has two sources. Associated gas comes from Jubilee and TEN and is processed at the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant, which has a peak capacity of 150 MMcf/d and typically runs at about 120 MMcf/d. Non-associated gas comes from the OCTP project, where Eni's Sankofa field feeds the FPSO John Agyekum Kufuor and then a pipeline to onshore terminals near Sanzule, joining the Western Corridor Gas Pipeline to power plants and industrial customers. OCTP provides about 70% of Ghana's total domestic gas supply, Eni and Oil and Gas Journal report.

The gas expansion now underway is the largest energy investment in the country. In July 2025 Eni completed upgrades to OCTP's non-associated gas system that raised processing capacity to 270 MMcf/d, from 246 MMcf/d. On October 2, 2026, Eni and Yinson Production, the FPSO operator, signed a contract amendment for a $600 million upgrade adding gas compression and treatment modules to the FPSO, which will raise gas export capacity from 210-220 MMcf/d to 355 MMcf/d by the first quarter of 2028 and extend the vessel's lease to 2036. On shore, the Ghana National Gas Company is building a second processing facility, Gas Processing Plant Train 2, next to Atuabo, with 150 MMcf/d of nominal capacity scalable to 300 MMcf/d, at an estimated $700-812 million, also targeting early 2028. Together the two plants would provide 450 MMcf/d of processing capacity.

The government has tied the gas expansion to the wider revival. The June 2025 memorandum with the Jubilee and TEN partners envisages raising gas supplies from those fields to about 130 MMcf/d, and the 2026 Budget Statement recorded an agreement with the OCTP partners, led by Eni, for an additional 80 MMcf/d. In September 2025 Eni, Vitol and GNPC also signed a memorandum of intent with the government covering a production increase and new sustainable initiatives, including evaluation of the Eban-Akoma field for development through the existing OCTP facilities, with a development plan submitted to the authorities at the end of 2025.

Fiscal Terms and Governance

Ghana's petroleum sector is run by three institutions created or strengthened after Jubilee. The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) is the state-owned commercial participant, holding carried interests in the fields (19.69% of Jubilee, 20% of OCTP) and lifting the state's share of crude. The Petroleum Commission, established in 2011, regulates upstream operations. The Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), created by the Petroleum Revenue Management Act of 2011, audits petroleum revenue and publishes the annual and semi-annual reports that are the best public source for production and lifting data.

Revenue transparency is unusually good for a small producer: PIAC reported total receipts of $843.5 million from GNPC's crude liftings across the three fields in 2024, and its reports break out liftings by field, including GNPC's 5.72 million barrels from Jubilee, 0.99 million from TEN and 1.83 million from Sankofa in 2024. The June 2025 memorandum of understanding between the government and the Jubilee and TEN partners is the most important fiscal event of the decade: it extends the West Cape Three Points and Deep Water Tano licences to 2040, amends the Jubilee plan of development to include up to 20 additional wells, and is expected to attract as much as $2 billion of incremental investment. The government approved the extensions in late December 2025, and Parliament ratified them in February 2026. A rig contract for the 2027-28 drilling programme (Campaign 2), covering up to 10 wells with the rig arriving around the middle of 2027, was signed in 2026.

Refining and the Domestic Market

Ghana produces crude but has refined almost none of it for years. The Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), commissioned in 1963 with a nameplate capacity of 45,000 barrels per stream day, saw its crude distillation unit idle from April 2021 and its residue fluid catalytic cracking unit shut since 2019. Domestic demand for oil products was therefore met almost entirely by imports, even as the country exported its crude: in 2021 it exported more than 71 million barrels of oil, with China taking over 41% and South Africa 13.9%.

That changed at the end of 2025. After turnaround maintenance on the crude distillation unit from August 1 to October 30, 2025, and clearance from the National Petroleum Authority, crude processing officially resumed on December 19, 2025, with products moving into storage for the first time in years. The refinery has since operated at about 28,000 barrels per stream day, below its 45,000 nameplate, and a new furnace (F-61) is intended to restore the unit to its original capacity. TOR reported receiving more than five million barrels of crude since May 2026, including a Jubilee cargo aboard the MT Apache on July 15, 2026 and a subsequent 950,000-barrel cargo supplied by GNPC.

Management has set out an ambitious expansion: 100,000 barrels per stream day within one to two years and 200,000 by 2028, through a brownfield expansion of the existing plant by 40,000 b/sd to 85,000 b/sd plus a new 115,000 b/sd plant at the site, under the Restoration and Legacy Projects programme for 2026-29. Those figures are management targets rather than installed capacity: no cost breakdown or financing schedule has been published, and the government has separately said it aims to meet 70% of Ghana's petroleum-product demand through domestic refining by 2028. A second phase of the planned $60 billion petroleum hub at Jomoro, in the Western Region, is also in the background. The restart is real and the expansion is not yet funded, and the two should not be confused.

Risks and Constraints

• Decline is the default. Production fell for five consecutive years from the 2019 peak, and the 2025-26 campaign only bends the curve. Every year without new wells returns the fields to decline.
• FPSO reliability. Jubilee's turret problems in the early 2020s and the 15-day planned maintenance shutdown in the first half of 2025 show how much national output depends on two floating vessels. Uptime above 99% in the first half of 2026 is the achievement the revival rests on.
• No new fields since 2017. Exploration has not delivered a fourth producing hub. The Eban-Akoma evaluation and the two offshore blocks Eni is pursuing with Vitol in the Tano Basin are the nearest chances.
• TEN economics. PIAC has questioned whether TEN's low production justifies its costs. Its future depends on continued optimisation rather than new investment.
• Reserve life. Proved reserves of 660 million barrels are about 14 years at 2024 production rates. Without new discoveries or reserve upgrades, the licence extensions to 2040 will outlast the proved barrels.
• Gas pricing and power sector debt. Sankofa's non-associated gas is historically the costliest domestic source, and the power sector's ability to pay for it decides whether the gas expansion earns its return.
• Refining execution. TOR's restart is a year old and its expansion is unfunded. The 100,000 and 200,000 b/sd targets are management ambitions, not committed projects.

Common Misreadings

• "Ghana produces about 190,000 barrels a day." Some databases show total liquids near 191,000 b/d for 2024. PIAC, the primary source, reports 48.24 million barrels of crude for the year, about 132,000 b/d. The higher figure mixes crude with other liquids on a different basis and should not be quoted as crude production.
• "Jubilee holds 3 billion barrels of reserves." The often-quoted 3 billion barrel figure is oil in place, the total volume in the reservoir rock. Recoverable reserves are far smaller, and Ghana's national proved reserves are about 660 million barrels.
• "Oil output rose 30%." The energy minister announced at African Energy Week 2026 that crude production had risen about 30% after five years of decline. The announcement did not specify the baseline or comparison period, so the figure is the minister's reported number, not an independently established measure of the national trend.
• "Ghana is a new oil producer." First oil was in December 2010. Ghana is a mature producer whose fields are in decline, not a frontier story like its Atlantic neighbour Guyana.
• "The Tema refinery expansion is underway." Crude processing restarted in December 2025, but the 100,000 and 200,000 b/sd expansion targets have no published financing or construction schedule.

What to Watch Next

1. Jubilee well results in 2026, especially the five wells due onstream during the year and whether gross output holds above 70,000 b/d.
2. The OCTP gas expansion, with the $600 million FPSO upgrade and the Atuabo Train 2 plant both targeting completion by the first quarter of 2028.
3. Campaign 2 drilling in 2027-28, the up-to-10-well programme whose rig arrives around mid-2027.
4. The Eban-Akoma decision, Eni's evaluation of a new development through existing OCTP facilities.
5. Tema refinery throughput, and whether the F-61 furnace lifts it from about 28,000 b/sd toward the 45,000 nameplate.
6. PIAC's 2025 annual report, for the full-year production total and whether the first-half decline was reversed.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much oil does Ghana produce?

Ghana produced 48.24 million barrels of crude oil in 2024, about 132,000 barrels per day, from the Jubilee, TEN and Sankofa fields, according to PIAC. Output peaked at 71.44 million barrels in 2019 and fell in the first half of 2025 before new Jubilee wells lifted it in 2026.

What are Ghana's three oil fields?

Jubilee, operated by Tullow Oil, which supplied 66% of 2024 output; Sankofa in the Offshore Cape Three Points block, operated by Eni, with 20%; and TEN, also operated by Tullow, with 14%. All three are offshore in the Gulf of Guinea.

How big are Ghana's oil reserves?

Proved crude reserves are about 660 million barrels, according to the EIA's 2025 figures. Proved and probable reserves were about 732 million barrels at the end of 2023, per Petroleum Commission data. Broader resource estimates that include contingent volumes run higher.

Does Ghana refine its own oil?

Barely, until recently. The Tema refinery's crude unit was idle from April 2021 until it restarted on December 19, 2025, and now processes about 28,000 barrels per stream day against a 45,000 nameplate. Most of Ghana's crude is exported and most of its fuel is imported.

Why is Ghana's gas important?

The Offshore Cape Three Points project supplies about 70% of Ghana's domestic gas, mainly for electricity generation. A $600 million upgrade will raise its gas export capacity to 355 million cubic feet per day by early 2028.

What is the 2040 licence extension?

In June 2025 the government and the Jubilee and TEN partners agreed to extend the field licences to 2040, allowing up to 20 additional wells at Jubilee and as much as $2 billion of investment. The government approved the extensions in late December 2025 and Parliament ratified them in February 2026.

---

References

1. Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), Ghana. 2024 Annual Report on the Use and Management of Petroleum Revenue; 2025 Semi-Annual Report. Via Ministry of Finance, Ghana. https://www.mofep.gov.gh/sites/default/files/reports/petroleum/2024-Annual-Petroleum-Report.pdf
2. U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). "Ghana." Country analysis, last updated August 2016, used only for the 2010 and 2015 rows of the production table; International Energy Statistics for proved reserves. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/GHA
3. Tullow Oil plc. Trading statement, 2025 full year production (Jubilee 60.9 kbopd gross, TEN 16.0 kbopd gross); 2026 half-year results, September 28, 2026 (Jubilee 70.8 kbopd gross in H1 2026). https://www.tullowoil.com/media/press-releases/
4. Energy Intelligence. Ghana country profile, November 2, 2026 (112,000 b/d Q1 2026 and 104,000 b/d 2025, quoted as estimates). https://www.energyintel.com/wcod/country-profile/ghana
5. Eni. OCTP Project in Ghana; "Eni Ghana and its OCTP Partners, Vitol and GNPC, launch Sankofa East 1X Side Track 2 activity," May 29, 2025. https://www.eni.com/en-IT/actions/global-activities/ghana/octp.html
6. Oil and Gas Journal. "Eni boosts gas processing at Ghana offshore project." August 11, 2025. https://www.ogj.com/general-interest/news/55312756/eni-boosts-gas-processing-at-ghana-offshore-project
7. African Energy Chamber. "Ghana's Crude Revival Opens New Investment Phase." October 14, 2026. https://energychamber.org/ghanas-crude-revival-opens-new-investment-phase/
8. Oil and Gas Journal. "Ghana's TOR proposes expanding Tema refinery to 200,000 b/sd by 2029." October 27, 2026. https://www.ogj.com/refining-processing/news/55414726/ghanas-tor-proposes-expanding-tema-refinery-to-200000-b-sd-by-2029
9. Oil and Gas Journal. "Tullow to increase oil, gas development activity in Ghana." January 5, 2026. https://www.ogj.com/drilling-production/news/55341335/tullow-to-increase-oil-gas-development-activity-in-ghana

All sources checked November 8, 2026.