Thomas Manu

Thomas Manu is a petroleum geophysicist with more than three decades of experience in Ghana’s upstream oil and gas industry. He has been a non-executive director of GOIL PLC since July 2012 and was kept on the nine-member board that shareholders approved in March 2025. GOIL’s board profile describes him as Vice President (Exploration and Production) of the Springfield Group, and in October 2024 he spoke for Springfield on the appraisal of its Afina oil discovery offshore Ghana. He chairs the Advisory Board of the Africa Energy Technology Centre (AETC) and was presented in that role when Ghana’s Ministry of Energy launched the Africa Energy Technology Conference in June 2023.

Manu spent most of his career at the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), which he joined for national service in 1990. He rose from assistant geophysicist to principal geophysicist, served as Director of Operations (Exploration, Production, Technology and Development) from 2002 to 2016, and in August 2016 became Deputy Chief Executive for Exploration and Production, overseeing the projects, geosciences, engineering and research, technology and development directorates. In June 2017 he was seconded to the Ministry of Energy as an adviser to the Minister on upstream and wider energy policy. He also served on the board of the Ghana National Gas Company.

At GNPC he played a key role in the discovery, development and production of the Jubilee, TEN, Sankofa-Gye Nyame and Pecan fields. He led the corporation’s team in negotiating the Offshore Cape Three Points (OCTP) gas sales agreements and the related security agreements with the contractor group and the World Bank, led the technical team that drafted the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act, 2016 (Act 919), and helped develop Ghana’s local content regulations. He led planning teams that produced GNPC’s strategy for attracting independent oil companies and a blueprint for the country’s petroleum industry, and was a technical and strategic adviser to the team that prepared Ghana’s case before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which delimited the maritime boundary between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Manu holds a master’s degree in exploration geophysics from the Moscow Institute of Exploration Geology (1988), an MBA in finance from the University of Ghana and an honorary Doctor of Science degree. He chairs the steering committee of the GNPC Research Chair in Petroleum Geoscience in the University of Ghana’s Department of Earth Science and has served on the management committees of the University of Ghana Business School and the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He is a member of the Association of International Petroleum Negotiators, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists and the Ghana Institute of Geoscientists.