Offshore Risk Regulation: A Comparative Analysis of Regimes in Ghana, the United Kingdom and Norway

This paper assesses Ghana's offshore health and safety regulatory regime in the context of international best practice in the upstream oil and gas industry. It contributes to the discussion of the emerging issue of offshore risk regulation in new petroleum producing countries. We present a comparative analysis contrasting two leading safety regimes namely the United Kingdom and Norway to Ghana’s emerging regime to benchmark common features as well as weaknesses. Our findings indicate that Ghana requires a robust regulatory regime that ensures that health and safety risks are properly delineated if the country is to avoid catastrophic accidents. This is especially important as these risks are more pronounced with deepwater operations such as those prevalent in the country’s petroleum basins. We propose the enactment of a general Health & Safety at Work law in Ghana backed by subsidiary regulations to harmonise the disjointed and sometimes incoherent health and safety provisions. Additionally, we propose that the health and safety regulatory function of the Ghana Petroleum Commission should be decoupled to form an independent Competent Authority as activity levels and the degree of complexity of operations increase to prevent conflict of interest between its regulatory and licensing functions.