Ghana’s government took the decision to impose a unitisation deal on Italian major Eni and Accra-based Springfield E&P for the offshore Sankofa-Afina asset out of frustration at the inability of the two companies to reach an agreement.

In the government’s first public pronouncement on the issue, Nana Oppong Damoah, head of communications at the Ministry of Energy, explained the decision in an interview on local radio late last week.

“Realising it was becoming next to impossible for the two of them [Springfield and Eni] on their own to reach an agreement, the government has gone ahead — based on its conviction that the necessary conditions for unitisation exist — to issue the directive,” he told Asase Radio.

Eni and Vitol, the partners in the producing Sankofa field, have publicly disagreed with the directives, but Damoah said: “The government stands by its decision and the directives are still valid, but we cannot stop them from taking any further action within the confines of the law.”

Justifying its decision to allocate Springfield a majority stake in the combined Sankofa-Afina asset, Damoah said the ministry has access to data supplied by state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), which is a partner in the West Cape Three Points 2 block (that hosted the Afina-1X discovery well) and also the Offshore Cape Three Points block that houses Sankofa.

“A GNPC report exists which satisfies the requirements, in our view, that both fields have achieved the necessary conditions for unitisation," he said.

The GNPC study showed that Springfield’s Afina component within the accumulation hosts 642 million barrels of oil, with 535 million barrels of oil falling within Eni’s Sankofa development plan.

Damoah said the Minister of Energy, John Peter Amewu, had previously ordered Eni and Springfield to exchange data sets on Sankofa and Afina “but for some reasons that never happened”.

“There is some reluctance on the side of both parties to achieve the unitisation, which is against Ghana’s interest [of ensuring] resources are extracted efficiently for the benefit of the country. I can’t see how anyone can challenge this motive.”

Under the ministry directive, Eni will become operator of the newly unitised Afina-Sankofa field with a minority 45.455% share, while Springfield will hold 54.545%, with both companies committed to jointly finalising the redetermination of field equity within 18 months, Upstream was told earlier this month.

An Eni spokesman told Upstream early last week that the Italian major is “in no way against evaluating the possibility for unitisation”, but argued that “there has not been any appraisal of the Afina discovery that would establish [its] commerciality and allow the parties to progress on the unitisation process".

Eni’s spokesman said unitisation may be warranted for the purposes of ensuring optimum recovery “if sufficient and reliable subsurface data show that Eni’s Sankofa field and Springfield’s Afina discovery are straddling the border and in dynamic communication".

Eni insisted that GNPC’s studies “neither demonstrate the existence of communication between Sankofa and Afina nor ascertain definitively that the discovered resources are producible.”

However, Damoah told the radio station that: “It is possible that Eni has been producing resources held in Springfield’s block.”

Production

'Impossible for them to reach agreement': Ghana justifies unitisation order on Eni and Springfield