Examining prospects and challenges of Ghana's petroleum industry: A systematic review

Established petroleum energy system comprises primary energy, conversion, transportation & distribution through to the final petroleum useful sectors. And disparate literature in such industry may not contribute to future research direction and policy development. Therefore, this study examines challenges and prospects of the petroleum industry in Ghana with innovative and transparent systematic literature review technique. Scholars developed procedural framework; first formulating the review question, identification and selection of literature. Researchers further establish scientific research criteria and accepted some relevant studies. The study then appraises the selected literature where scholars evaluated previous studies into qualitative and quantitative literature. Researchers finally, analyze and synthesize the literature with both narrative and triangulation techniques. The result reveals in both that previous literature has been disjointed and mainly focus on two topics; descriptive content petroleum policy and somehow on descriptive petroleum statistics. However, those studies have contributed immensely to the petroleum revenue management, local content, and petroleum production bills into applicable laws. Furthermore, this paper reveals that Ghana is petroleum import-dependent of 17%, 37% for natural gas, and 78% for petroleum products as of 2016. As of 2018, petroleum consumption accounted for about 80% of final energy excluding biomass in Ghana. And, the local petroleum production only contributes 5% of this total with importation share of 95%. This work finally observes that the literature had some research gaps after quantitative analysis with inferential statistics in broad petroleum issues and some critical topics such as petroleum infrastructure development. Thus, petroleum industry researches could not be examined with factor & discriminant analysis, logistic & probit regression, and path analysis to identify significant variables challenges and prospects. This study contributes knowledge in bringing the literature to current state of the art with systematic review technique. And further recommends strategic policy designs and future research path in the industry. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.