New Venture Company To Service Oil And Gas Industry

A new joint venture company, GNPC-Technip Engineering, to provide engineering services to Ghana’s oil and gas and energy sectors has been inaugurated in Accra.

The company, the product of a partnership between the Ghana National Petrol Company and Technip Engineering, will be responsible for activities for the oil and gas and related sectors including, feasibility and conceptual studies, engineering, design project management, engineering procurement construction, turnkey contracts and construction supervision.

The core mandate of the company is to complement government’s Local content and Local Participation Policy for the oil and gas sector which has objectives that includes maximizing value-addition, job creation, and utilisation of local expertise, goods and services, in the oil and gas industry value chain.

In a speech read on his behalf by a Deputy Minister of Energy, Mr Inusah Fuseini, the sector minister, Dr Joe Oteng- Adjei said “We are positioning ourselves to ensure that the country derives lasting benefits from our oil resources and we count on this Partnership between GNPC and Technip Engineering and similar future initiatives to help achieve this.”

He commended the two companies for coming together to set up the company - GNPC –Technip Engineering Company to provide engineering services for Ghana’s oil and gas and energy sectors.

Dr Oteng- Adjei noted the company’s existing skills and knowledge transfer programme aimed at building the capacity of the country’s young engineering students in the oil and gas sector in partnership with the KNUST, some of whom had already benefited from the programme and encouraged the company to continue passing on skills to the nation’s youth.

“It is our long term vision that the future generation takes control of the country’s oil wealth and I congratulate Technip Engineering for this support you are providing to our young people to enable them find employment in the country’s oil and gas sector”, he said.

The Minister said government was already collaborating with oil companies and had taken steps to grow the oil and gas expertise of Ghanaians by offering several scholarship packages for Ghanaians to pursue further studies abroad and in the country in various fields of the petroleum industry.

He implored other local institutions and foreign actors in the oil and gas sector to enter into similar meaningful partnerships to contribute to national efforts to ensure that the country derived lasting benefits from its oil resources.

The Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Technip, Thierry Pilenko, assured Ghanaians of the company’s commitment to the partnership and its projects as well as its training programmes to equip young engineers for Ghana’s oil and gas in the future.

He said “We remain committed to giving opportunities to Ghanaian nationals through a strong recruitment and training programme over the next two to three years in line with our future plan of activities” he said.

Mr Pilenko said in addition to the partnership agreement GNPC – TECHNIP Engineering Company had with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, (KNUST), the company has a new collaboration with Regional Maritime University to support the final year students of the 2nd semester of 2012 to 2013 to meet the anticipated staff for the shipyard project as well as future maritime operation in Ghana.??

The Chief Executive Officer of GNPC, Nana Boakye Asafu Adjaye said, GNPC was excited about the joint venture that clearly brought a lot of value to Ghana’s oil and gas sector, particularly the role it would play in building capacity through advanced engineering and the training of local personnel for the sector.

“We are committed to ensuring that Ghana benefits immensely from this partnership”, he said.

Source: Daily Graphic