In the past, one of the major resources Ghana is known for was gold. However, in 2018, a young, savvy understated Ghanaian entrepreneur came to light, and the news that he invested $70 million into oil exploration in Ghana, was as shocking as it was unbelievable. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know who the investor was, where he came from and why he went into oil exploration.
Kevin Okyere, is a young, well-bred Ghanaian, who decided to invest in oil exploration in developing the highly promising West Cape Three Points Block 2 offshore Ghana (WCTP2). He is the CEO of Springfield Group, an energy conglomerate he founded and he owns an 82% interest and operatorship in the oil block, which covers 673 square kilometers in the Gulf of Guinea’s Tano Basin. Springfield Group made history as the first Ghanaian homegrown company that would invest in oil exploration, and that was a very huge risk.
Kevin however, is driven by the vision to succeed at it, as he believes that the success of Springfield Group in oil exploration, would send a strong message that Ghanaians are also capable of exploring oil indigenously. “We can’t afford to fail; we are in a unique position to set a precedent for indigenous companies looking to participate in the upstream sector. If we succeed, then we’d have sent a strong message, that Ghanaians are just as capable. That’s really important to me.” He told Mfon Nsehe in an interview.
His $70 million investment in the energy sector is even higher than what some of his mentors in the oil business have ever invested in the sector. Kevin Okyere;s modest looks belie his entrepreneurship prowess and ambitions. He singlehandedly built his company Springfield Group into a $1 billion multi-faceted energy conglomerate, over the past 16 years, and went into oil exploration at age 38. Springfield Group is involved in trading and transporting hydrocarbons, terminal ling and storage, gas stations, and then oil exploration. The company’s employees comprise of Nigerians and Ghanaians as well.
Kevin Okyere currently 42 years old, hails from one of the rich families in Ghana’s gold-rich Ashanti region. His father though a traditional chief now, had made a fortune in construction, steel manufacturing and large-scale cocoa farming. However, Okyere was very aware he was born into wealth, however, he chose to carve his own path to success. By the time he was 11 years old, he was selling iced water to football supporters in the Kumasi Sports Stadium, and yes he made money from the teeming sports lovers. His family had a tradition of traveling to London every summer for vacation, Kevin would turn his vacation to a job opportunity and work with textile companies in the UK during the short trip.
Everyone that knew Kevin could not understand why he hustled, especially because his father was wealthy.
Kevin finished his secondary education in Ghana, and proceeded to the United States where he studied Accounting at the George Mason University in Virginia. Needless to say, Kevin worked and studied at same time, he worked in a caregiver for mentally challenged people, worked as a security guard, and also worked in the mail room at AOL. He was attracted to any legitimate thing that could earn him money.
Kevin much later worked at XM Satellite radio now (Sirius XM Holdings), as a radio programmer. He also worked in the customer service department at Sprint, and got a job offer from a leading commercial bank in the US, as he completed his degree. His bank job was to pay him was to pay him $72,000 a year. But Kevin resisted the tempting offer and returned to Ghana.
To Kevin, Ghana was a virgin land and armed with his US experience in the telecoms sector, he briefly worked with his elder sister in 2004, on his return. As an entrepreneur he needed to understand how the country worked, and one year later, in 2005, Kevin put together a small team of investors and they started Westland Alliance Ltd, a telecoms company that provided international call routing services for AT&T and several international calling card companies.
Westland Alliance and its subsidiaries eventually diversified into cell towers and value-added services, (VAS) for mobile phone companies. The company was extremely successful, but Kevin soon got tired of the telecoms industry and decided to go into something else. “The company was doing very well, but there was a lot of uncertainty with our core business, the call routing business. My contracts with our clients were revisited every year and I realized that my destiny was in the hand of the telecom companies who reserved the right to terminate my contract at any time. I also couldn’t own a mobile telecom company because the license alone cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which was clearly out of my reach. I started planning my exit and looking for the next big opportunity,” he said.
Okyere was introduced to the oil industry in 2006, while still running Westland Alliance, he discovered through a business acquaintance, who supplied crude oil and condensates to the Tema refinery that there was a shortfall of storage facilities for petroleum products in Tema. Kevin quickly bought a land close to the Tema refinery and started building a storage tank farm in Tema. After a while, he invited officials from Ghana’s National Petroleum Authority to inspect his construction project, and they were marveled at what the 26-year-old was doing that they advised him to apply for a Petroleum Product Import License. Kevin’s tank farm at that time was a capital-intensive project that was already employing lots of Ghanaians.
That was how Springfield Energy started its trading business, and has so far been importing refined petroleum products such as gasoline, dual-purpose, kerosene, gasoil, and naphtha and jet fuel to Ghana. And from 2008, when Springfield Energy started, they have become the dominant importer of fuel products into Ghana and the trading business can boast of a revenue of more than $1 billion annually. This lush profit happened because then international oil companies interested in doing oil business in Ghana had to partner with locally own oil companies, as that was the rule in Ghana. Springfield Energy has been partners with BP PLC in Ghana since 2010, and profits from that business partnership has been diversified into other businesses in the energy value chain. As at today, Springfield Energy, co-owns gas stations in Ghana, storage facilities, an oilfield services subsidiary and a haulage company.
In 2011, Okyere thought expansion and along with his partner, Geena Malkani, they formed a new company Springfield Ashburton, and visited Nigeria to take advantage of the opportunities in the downstream space in the country. They applied to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), to be among the international companies, who are awarded the lucrative crude oil lifting contracts. They tried this for 2 years without any success, but in 2014, three years after Springfield Ashburton had been registered in Nigeria, and after partnering with BP PLC, they were enlisted for the 2014/2015 Crude Oil Term Contract. It was victory for Okyere and Ghana, as his company was the first Ghanaian company to be awarded such highly coveted long-term oil contract. Of course, there was some controversies around the award, some even insinuated that Okyere was a close business associate of Nigeria’s former powerful Petroleum Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke. The media went all out with that narrative, and Okyere quickly denied it, as well as sued them to court. This won him financial judgements as well as media retraction of those stories.
According to Okyere, “I was not the minister’s associate or acquaintance and we did not have any sort of relationship. Springfield Ashburton was awarded the contract strictly on merit, and because of our sheer persistence. For 3 years since 2011 we had been visiting the NNPC offices every week, liaising with officials of the Crude Oil Marketing department, demonstrating our capacity. They saw our track record in Ghana; we had a turnover of more than $800 million in 2012 even before we won the Nigerian contracts and the records are there. We had the financial capacity and a strategic partnership with BP that gave us an edge to win after our first two attempts. Those media stories were sponsored by our competitors who were unhappy with us,” Well then, if there were records to these facts, then he was right.
Springfield Ashburton is still doing oil business in Nigeria, in fact, they were shortlisted in 2015 by the NNPC for the Offshore Processing Agreements (OPA). However, this has been discontinued, as NNPC instead adopted direct trading of Nigeria’s oil.
Not daunted at all, Okyere saw an opportunity in the Ghanaian oil space and applied for an oil block in Ghana in 2012, through WCTP2, an oil block with proven reserves on it. The WCTP2 was formerly handled by Kosmos Energy, a Dallas, Texas-based Oil Company and Tullow Oil, who had relinquished their hold on WCTP2 (West Cape Three Points Block), to concentrate on producing oil from the Jubilee oil field. The Ghanaian government, would not just let Okyere have the oil block without some conditions. They made him to set up a full-fledged E&P unit, and also made him to commit at least $100 million over a 7-year period to develop the oil block. Okyere met all these conditions through Springfield E&P in 2012, but didn’t get the oil rights award until 2016, and the rights to explore oil on WCTP2 was ratified by parliament. Okyere immediately, hired oil veteran Bernard Vigneaux, a former executive of Total and Perenco, to lead exploration the efforts.
The block, WCTP2, is well located along with other oil blocks such as, Tullow Oil/ Kosmos Energy’s prolific Jubilee field, Hess’ Greater Pecan project and Eni’s Sankofa-Gye Nyame field. After Kosmos Energy drilled the WCTP2 well five times, Springfield also identified a large Campanianage leads and other prospects in the block. This was discovered through the vintage seismic 3D data, they inherited from Kosmos Energy. Springfield Energy has invested heavily into the 800 square kilometers of fresh 3D broadband seismic data that PGS’ Ramform Titan vessel acquired, on the deep-water block, and they are continuously conducting exploration activities for new leads and prospects. Though a very expensive project, which has also consumed Okyere’s personal funds, but Okyere who is sure the entire block has over 3.5 billion barrels of oil and 5 trillion cubic feet of gas, has been enjoying the drilling of the well by Springfield E&P since January 2019.
“I wanted to prove that Ghanaians can do it. It would have been so easy for me to invest my money and time in other less tedious ventures. But as indigenous pacesetters, our success would encourage more local players into the industry, and that is very important for Ghana,”
Another passion for Okyere is philanthropy, he founded Kevin Okyere Foundation in partnership with the Springfield Group, and they support education and health programs in Ghana. The Foundation funds the hospital bills of poor patients, who cannot afford to foot their bills in the largest government-owned hospital in Ghana. They also pay school fees for hundreds of Primary school children in Ghana. Kevin Okyere, also sends some of the country’s brightest students to Universities in North America and Europe.
Needless to say that Kevin Okyere is not doing badly at age 42, and wants to remember not as a wealthy Ghanaian, but as one of the best givers in Ghana.
