I am looking for my Johnny. Do you know Johnny?

Imagine your son, John Mensah, is graduating from boarding school. You hire a logistics company: “Go and pick up John Mensah. Just ask — they will find him.”

What you don’t know is that at school, everyone calls him John Mahama. And that day he is not in his dorm. He is in the chemistry lab with the NSMQ team.

So instead of a ten-minute pickup, the driver spends four hours going block to block — “John Mensah? John Mensah?” — until someone finally says: “Oh, you mean John Mahama. He’s in the chem lab.”

You pay for four hours, not ten minutes. You pay for the confusion.

This is exactly what happens offshore at decommissioning — except the four hours can cost tens of millions of dollars.

Assets change their names too

You install a manifold, a pipeline, an FPSO mooring in 2015. Over twenty years, it changes. Operations gives it a nickname — PLEM 3 becomes “the old PLEM”. Currents, trawlers and scour move it. Sediment buries it, marine life colonises it, a fisherman’s gear cuts into it. The as-built drawings on paper no longer match what the sonar sees.

If nobody kept a live register while the field was producing, then at decommissioning you are sending a very expensive vessel to “pick up John Mensah”. The vessel arrives. The asset is not where you left it, not in the condition you left it, and not called what you left it.

And now you pay — for the confusion:

These figures are indicative, but the pattern is well documented. In the North Sea, a single unregistered spool has been reported to cost an operator on the order of $18m in vessel standby. Ghana cannot afford surprises like that across Jubilee, TEN and Sankofa.

What the register does instead

The answer is to keep the register while the field is producing, not to reconstruct it afterwards. That is what we are building at Enatlas, aligned with the IHO S-100 family of marine data standards:

• Every subsea asset gets one identity that never changes — with every nickname mapped to it.
• Its real position is kept current from satellite monitoring and inspection reports, not frozen at installation.
• Condition photos, the last intervention and burial depth are logged as they happen.

So in 2035, when the contractor asks for “John Mensah”, the register answers: legal ID PLEM-03, alias “the old PLEM”, last confirmed at 04°33′N 02°44′W, two metres under silt east of the riser — bring a dredge.

A ten-minute pickup. No uncertainty invoice.

Without a register, you pay twice: once to install, and once to find what you installed.

This is the record-keeping discipline that Norway and the UK arrived at after their own expensive lessons — public, versioned registers of what sits on their seabed. Ghana can start in 2026, while our fields are still producing and the knowledge is still fresh.