OREANDA-NEWS. London-listed independent Tullow Oil confirmed today that technical issues have forced it to suspend gas exports from the Jubilee field offshore Ghana since 3 July, while the field's crude production is currently constrained at around 65,000 b/d.

The firm is working on repairing a fault within with the gas compression system on the field's floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel. It expects to resume gas exports and reinstate "full oil production" by mid-August. Ghana's state-owned oil firm GNPC flagged up problems with the FPSO last week, saying that an unplanned shutdown was causing loading delays. Three 950,000 bl Jubilee crude cargoes were scheduled to load this month, with another four planned in August.

Jubilee produced around 105,000 b/d of crude in the first half of the year. Final commissioning of an onshore gas processing facility at Atuabo, designed to handle Jubilee's associated gas output, was completed in March this year. Since then, gas exports to the plant averaged around 80mn ft?/d until they were suspended on 3 July.

Tullow said on 1 July that it expects Jubilee's full-year crude output to be around 103,000 b/d, taking into account a one-week planned shutdown in the second half of the year. But the company will update its 2015 forecast at its half-yearly results on 29 July.

Jubilee's FPSO is capable of processing around 120,000 b/d but it has not reached capacity because of technical problems at some of the field's wells and delays in the construction of the onshore gas processing plant, forcing Tullow to limit crude production. The Ghanaian government rejected applications to flare Jubilee gas, which meant that Tullow had to re-inject it until the Atuabo plant was up and running.