How Karpowership Turned Ghana's Own Gas Into an $18 Million-a-Month Saving for the Country

A Barge Sails Out at Night

On the night of August 15, 2019, the Karadeniz Powership Osman Khan, at 470 megawatts the largest vessel in Karpowership's fleet, cast off from Tema fishing harbour and set out under tow for the Western Naval Command at Sekondi, roughly 300 kilometres down Ghana's coast. It had spent two years generating power there, first connected in 2017. What was about to change was the fuel behind it.

Gas Ghana Already Owned

For those two years in Tema, the Osman Khan had run on heavy fuel oil, shipped in and paid for like any other imported commodity. Ghana, meanwhile, was producing its own natural gas offshore, from the Sankofa and OCTP fields, under a take-or-pay contract that required the country to pay for a set volume whether it used the gas or not. Unused, that gas was costing the government roughly $40 million a month. Sekondi put an end to that mismatch. Once the powership was connected to gas piped in from Ghana's own fields, it began absorbing close to half of that contracted volume.

Eighteen Million Dollars, Every Month Since

The Daily Graphic, after touring the relocated plant, reported the result plainly: 18 million dollars a month in savings for the country, every month since 2019. Ghana's 2020 mid-year budget review used a different measure, projecting savings of 170.5 million dollars a year and as much as 1.2 billion dollars over the remaining life of the contract. Zeynep Harezi, Karpowership's chief commercial officer, later recalled the mid-August night the ship set sail as a turning point for the relationship with Ghana. Volkan Buyukbicer, managing director of Karpowership Ghana, was blunter at the dockside: "today we have achieved what we describe as a 'big move.'"

Same Megawatts, Different Fuel

What makes the story worth telling isn't the tonnage of gas or the size of the ship. It's that Ghana did not need a new power plant to start saving tens of millions of dollars a month: the same 470 megawatts, moved 300 kilometres down the coast and switched to the country's own gas, were enough. The 470 megawatts went offline during the relocation, and the plant was back on the grid in early September 2019, first on heavy fuel oil, before switching to Ghanaian gas from Atuabo on 20 November 2019. What changed was the fuel behind them, from an imported commodity priced in dollars to a resource the country already owned and had already committed to paying for.

A Model Ghana Has Leaned On Since

The Ghana Energy Awards recognised the relocation as the year's most strategic deal in 2019 and followed up with an award for excellence in power generation in 2020. Karpowership has been in the country since 2015, and the Sekondi conversion remains the clearest example of what the partnership can do beyond simply keeping the lights on: turning a stranded national resource into a saving that keeps compounding, month after month, for as long as the gas keeps flowing to the plant that's already there to burn it.