Ghana: Tema Oil Refinery MD Highlights Expansion Opportunities, Seeks Strategic Partners

The Managing Director of Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), Ghana’s state-owned refinery, Edmond Kombat, has highlighted investment opportunities at the facility and urged local and international oil and gas investors to partner with the company.

Kombat said TOR was seeking strategic partners to expand its refining capacity from 45,000 barrels per stream day (bpsd) to 85,000 bpsd, with a longer-term plan to increase capacity to 200,000 bpsd.

Speaking on Ghana Day, the second day of Africa Oil Week in Accra, Kombat said the planned expansion would increase TOR’s refining capacity, enable the refinery to process more crude locally and boost the supply of locally refined petroleum products to Ghana and other West African markets.

The project forms part of TOR’s phased expansion plans, he said.

“We are going to expand the refinery. There are two phases. One is the brownfield. We are currently going to take it from 45,000 to 85,000 [barrels per day], and the timeline that we have is that we can do it in one and a half years,” Kombat said.

“We are not looking for a 50-year timeline where we will not be there and say that we didn’t have time. We have a short period of time to get that done,” he added.

The second phase, which Kombat described as a greenfield expansion, would increase capacity from 85,000 bpd to 200,000 bpd, he said.

“That will be the end stage for the land that we currently have,” he said.

Kombat also highlighted investment opportunities in storage and related infrastructure, saying TOR needed partners to provide capital, technology and access to markets.

He acknowledged growing interest in the refinery and said investors and potential strategic partners should examine the opportunities available at TOR.

Ghana currently consumes about 133,000 barrels of petroleum products per day, equivalent to about 21 million litres, Kombat said. Last year, the country imported about 6.2 million metric tons of petroleum products, of which about 1 million metric tons were destined for Burkina Faso and other West African countries, he said.

Kombat said Ghana’s political stability made it an important supply hub for countries in the region.

“Most West African nations depend on Ghana given the country’s political stability,” he said.

TOR had already held discussions with Burkina Faso and other countries, and they were ready to take significant volumes of petroleum products from Ghana, Kombat said.

He also said the government was committed to insulating TOR from future political interference, citing the refinery’s history of management challenges.

“It will be set up as a kind of separate entity in an SPV structure to make sure that the board is quite independent, management does not have any interference, because it’s a strategic national asset for the country,” Kombat said.

Kombat said President John Dramani Mahama had also directed officials to work towards a system under which Ghanaian crude would eventually be purchased in cedis, once the necessary legislation was passed.

“The President, after giving us the Ghanaian crude from the fields, has directed the Governor as well as the Minister of Finance and Minister of Energy that in the not-too-distant future, once an Act of Parliament is passed, we should buy all the crude in cedis,” he said.

“If we buy all the crude in cedis and we pay for it in cedis, all this discussion about forex, we will not have those kinds of issues again,” he added.