Uche Cecil Izuora
The volume of petrol required by Ghana from Nigeria may drop significantly as the country’s state-owned 45,000 b/d Tema refinery has resumed operations after suffering being inoperative since April 2021.
The restart will help ease the country’s reliance on clean product imports, which have more than doubled since 2017 to 128,000 b/d this year, including 65,000 b/d of diesel/gasoil and 52,000 b/d of gasoline, according to Kpler data.
Nigeria’s 650,000 b/d Dangote refinery was the biggest supplier this year, sending 27,000 b/d of oil products to Ghana.
The Tema refinery is running at 28,000 b/d, with all product streams “going to storage for the first time in several years”, operator TOR said. The site has capacity to store 260,000t of products and 1.93mn bl of crude.
Three months of maintenance work on the crude distillation unit (CDU) finished on 30 October, and regulators cleared operations to restart on 19 December. The government appointed new management in May, led by Edmond Kombat, tasked with restarting the CDU and a 14,000 b/d residue fluid catalytic cracker. The refinery missed an October deadline to resume operations.
TOR plans to lift crude runs to nameplate capacity once a new furnace is integrated into the atmospheric distillation unit.
Medium-term upgrades include raising CDU capacity to 60,000 b/d and replacing a 6,500 b/d catalytic reformer with a 10,000 b/d continuous catalytic reformer.