Photograph courtesy Tunlow Oil
Ghana's President John Atta Mills opens the valve for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation's Jubilee project on December 15, 2010. The offshore well in some 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) of water may produce as much as 2 billion barrels of oil and 800 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
Partnering with Anadarko and other petroleum companies, Ghana's national oil concern has a 13.75 percent stake in the project and hopes to usher in a new era of prosperity for the African country—if its growing oil industry can be managed without corruption, violence, and environmental degradation.
Jubilee and another Anadarko well (Venus) near the Sierra Leone-Liberia border may bookend a 700-mile (1,100-kilometer) undersea basin with an active petroleum system and hundreds of millions of barrels of deepwater oil. These and other projects are helping a new group of West African nations join established giants like Angola and Nigeria as the continent's major petroleum exporters.