About 90 per cent of the Osagyefo Power Barge at Effasu in the Jomoro Constituency of the Western Region has been dismantled without authorisation, a Deputy Minister of Energy, William Owuraku Aidoo, has told Parliament.
According to him, it is suspected that a private company which is in negotiation with the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) to decommission the barge on a proposed 60:40 per cent sharing formula, Misak Limited, undertook the dismantling.
The deputy minister explained that the government had initiated steps to decommission the 185 MW plant which had suffered deterioration from excessive corrosion as a result of idleness since 2007.
In an answer to a question asked of him by the Member of Parliament for Jomoro, Dorcas Toffey, Mr Aidoo said the government had put in place measures to stop the dismantling until the disposal process was concluded.
"The Ministry of Energy in a letter dated November 6, 2015 directed the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation to take ownership of the barge which has been a subject of litigation between two American firms - Balkan Energy and ProEnergy - over a breach in an agreement to bring the plant to life."
"However, due to the prolonged legal dispute, which prevented the GNPC from working on the barge, no maintenance activities could be performed throughout the arbitration, leading to the deterioration from excessive corrosion," he said.
A third party assessment of the barge in 2019 under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s Integrated Resource and Resilience Planning Project, Mr Aidoo, MP for Afigya Kwabre South said, recommended a decommissioning of the facility.
"After performing a technical audit on the barge, USAID, in its report, recommended that it was not commercially viable to return the barge to service as the cost of refurbishment would likely far exceed the cost of purchasing a new barge."
As a result, he said, GNPC received an expression of interest to decommission the barge through the Ministry of Energy from Misak Limited, dated March 2, 2022 with a directive on the proposed sharing formula.
Subsequently, he said, the GNPC visited the barge site with other stakeholders only to find that dismantling of the barge had begun without recourse to due process.
"On February 9, 2023, the GNPC constituted Board of Survey team visited the barge site and provided a status update report dated March 28, 2023. The team observed that about 90 per cent of the barge was dismantled. Through the interaction with local community, it is believed that Miskat Limited carried out the dismantling of the barge without engaging GNPC to formalise an agreement as directed by the Minister of Energy," he revealed.
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The Ministry, he said, would prevail on the GNPC to continue with steps as outlined in the Public Procurement Authority guidelines for the disposal of scrap material and engage Misak to formalise an agreement to share the revenue from the scrap material among GNPC, the project community and Misak.
Engaging the media on the "illegal" decommissioning, Ms Toffey said persons behind Misak must be prosecuted for trespassing the plant.
"Till today, there has not been any legal action against the company that undertook this illegal dismantling rather the government is seeking to share the proceeds of an illegality.
"As the MP for the area, I am demanding that the company be brought to book and a full scale forensic audit into the disposal of the barge."
The 77metres long barge is equipped with a pair of single-cycle heavy-duty gas turbine units and designed to burn either natural gas or diesel.
