Ghana is not in a position to hire qualified reservoir engineers for its Petroleum Commission as the engagement of such professionals come with huge cost.
A member of the board of the Petroleum Commission, David Atta-Peters, disclosed this at the Regional Extractive Industries Knowledge Hub’s 2012 Summer School at GIMPA in Accra.
He revealed this after making a presentation on ‘Exploration, Development & Production (Oil & Gas).’
According to him, “Government won’t even allow you to pay each reservoir engineer about $25,000 every month. Already, it is battling with the Single Spine Salary payments.”
Dr Atta-Peters noted that there are a good number of such professionals in the country “but they will not leave their well-paid jobs and risk their lives where their financial expectations won’t be met.”
He said the Petroleum Commission was a young one and that it recently put advertisements out to employ engineers.
The commission was inaugurated in November last year and it is renting a place somewhere around the Kotoka International Airport (KIA).
“The highly-technical areas are where we need seasoned professionals and so we have had to be poaching people from the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) on secondment.”
The commission, he noted, had taken over the regulatory function that the GNPC used to exercise in addition to the issuance of permits.
By Samuel Boadi
