Company to meet community leaders

Pg 31. Tues. April 1/08

Story: Charles Benoni Okine, New York

THE President of Kosmos Energy, Mr Jim Musselman, has stated that the company will meet all the chiefs and opinion leaders within the community in which it operates to ascertain their immediate needs before embarking on its social responsibility programme.
“We need to seriously involve them to know what they want, which is their priority; this is important to ensure that we give them what they want and not do what we perceive to be their needs,” he added.
Mr Musselman, who is also the Chief Executive Officer of the company, was speaking in a telephone interview from his base in Dallas, Texas on the company’s strategies for its social responsibility programmes.
“We believe that we need to give some of what we are getting back to the communities within which we are operating and I can assure Ghanaians we will not toy with that,” he added.
The issue of insensitivity to social responsibilities by oil exploration companies has been one of the major causes of conflicts between the communities and such companies in many oil producing countries such as Nigeria.
But Mr Musselman stated that “this will not happen in Ghana because we have a track record when it comes to that and we do not have any problems as far as that is concerned in the countries we drill oil”.
He said the company believed in education and expressed the hope that the provision of schools would be one of the major priorities of the communities when they met the chiefs to discuss their priorities.
On environmental issues, the President of Kosmos said the company was very alert to its responsibilities of ensuring that it mopped up any spills to prevent any adverse effect to the environment.
He said the company operated within internationally acceptable standards and would work to maintain its track record as far as protecting the environment within which it operated was concerned.
The issue of environmental safety was one of the major topics that were raised during the National Oil and Gas Forum called at the instance of President Kufuor barely a month ago to, among others, solicit the views of experts and representatives of the public to make the oil discovery in the country a blessing and not a curse.
Mr Musselman described the forum as an innovation and one that the company least expected to happen.
“The government, led by President Kufuor, did the right thing because of his concern for the country and we believe that was a brilliant idea which must be emulated by other oil producing countries,” he added.
Mr Musselman said the resource was for the entire country and revenues accruing from it must go to the benefit of all and noted that it was against this background that the company applauded the government for the move to plan ahead of full production.
He was optimistic that the full production would begin within the next four to five years because of the intensified nature of the exploration activities.
Meanwhile, Mr Musselman said the company was working hard towards starting production by the middle of next year in smaller quantities while exploration of other wells continued.
“Full production is not instantaneous; It is a process and the company was working steadily according to plan to reach that stage,” he said.
He said the company was presently working on the Jubilee fields also within the Cape Three Points of the Tano Basin to get more leads as to what was expected from its area of operation.
Mr Musselman said having drilled two successive wells within a year, the company was poised to drill up to eight by the end of the year.
He said the three companies working on the Cape Three Points, including Tullow and Anadarko, had put together resources to lease a rig that would work in the country for a long period.
Mr Musselman called for patience as the company did its best to explore the oil resource, adding that when full production starts, it could last between 35 and 40 years.