Ghana’s energy minister John Jinapor said the country imported a 450,000-Barrel cargo of light crude oil on May 19, 2025, just in time to replenish the stock of fuel on which the country relies for power generation. He told parliament on 16 May that the country had only 2.6 days of supply left.
”The vessel has arrived. We are OK with the fuel. We are going to start the discharge”, Jinapor said of the imported crude oil cargo on local radio station CitiFM 97.3 on May 19, 2025. His parliamentary disclosure of low crude oil stock sparked public uproar, especially as various parts of the country saw blackouts over the weekend of May 16–18, 2025.
But Jinapor said his words were taken out of context because the country’s power sector does not rely on light crude oil primarily but on natural gas that is sourced from the country’s offshore fields and pipeline imports from Nigeria.
“There is no challenge with gas. ENI is producing even beyond capacity, beyond their contractual volume. Tullow, they are producing beyond what they normally produce”, Jinapor said, referring to gas supply from the two international upstream producers operating offshore Ghana. “Nigerian Gas has even increased their [supply]. But for those three sources we would have run into a real problem”, Jinapor continued.
State-owned Ghana National Gas Company Limited(Ghana Gas) said in a press release that “a technical issue” on the floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel Kwame Nkrumah, located on the Jubilee field operated by the UK-listed independent Tullow Oil, stopped the supply of natural gas to the domestic market on May10, 2025. But the problem was resolved and gas supply resumed within a few days. ENI scheduled a maintenance shutdown of its John Agyekum Kufuor FPSO this year that would have put Ghana’s power sector in a difficult situation, but the government has convinced the Italian operator to push back the planned maintenance to next year, Jinapor said.
Given the natural gas supply situation, there should have been no uproar over the depletion of the stock of light crude oil that only serves as back-up fuel for Ghana’s thermal power plants, Jinapor said. The cargo of imported crude was bought from Nigeria over a month in advance, allowing sufficient time for sea transport, Jinapor said. And, the power cuts were responses to the adverse weather conditions that prevailed over the weekend of May 16–18 2025, having been requested by the National Disaster Management Organisation, the energy minister continued.
Although other industry sources put the value 30% lower, the energy minister said that Ghana generates about 4,700MW of electricity. But demand is growing at an annual rate of 300MW, against a backdrop of $3Bilion in sectoral debts of which $1.8Bilion are arrears owed to independent power plants. In the week of May 26, 2025, , Jinapor had also alerted parliament to a threat by Turkish energy firm Karpowership to shutdown its 470MW power ship by May 18, 2025 over $400Million in debts. But the energy minister tried to reassure the public during his radio interview, saying he has negotiated a resolution to that problem and the company will no longer follow through with its threat.
Ghana produces light sweet crude but its reliance on imports for power generation might be due to pricing and supply dynamics that are connected to the country’s steadily declining oil output. The parliamentary oil industry watchdog PIAC said on April 29 2025 that Ghana’s crude production has declined every year from about 196,000BOPD in 2019 to about 132,000Barrels of Oil Per Day (BOPD) in 2025.
Ghana’s finance ministry had announced, in the first quarter of 2025, that government was plansning to build another gas processing plant that would “reduce the country’s reliance on expensive imported liquid fuels, improve gas supply for power generation and industrial use, and save the nation close to $500Million every two years”.
Jinapor said the government has now formed an implementation committee that will lead the building of the new power plant, the second after the 150Millio standard cubic feet per day (MMscf/d) Atuabo plant that started operations in 2015. There is sufficient gas supply for the new plant’s capacity to be at least 100MMscf/d, Jinapor said. But the energy minister expects Ghana’s power sector to maintain an 80:20 fuel mix of natural gas to liquids as a risk management strategy against gas supply disruptions even after the new plant starts.
