New oil refinery to commence operations January

A new oil refinery under construction in the Tema Industrial Enclave is expected to commence commercial operations in January next year.

An investment of the Sentuo Group of Companies, the $3-billion facility, with a capacity of 100,000 barrels per stream day (bpd), will be the largest refinery in the country.

It will boost local refining capacity by 60,000bpd, up from the previous 40,000bpd produced by the state-owned Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) prior to the decommissioning of its expanded plant, which got damaged in an explosion in 2017.

Furthermore, the new refinery will help the country cut its long-standing dependence on imported gasoline and diesel supplies and save the millions of dollars spent to import finished petroleum products.

According to consultants on the project, George Andoh and Albert Duncan, the first phase of the facility, construction of which began in June 2021, was expected to refine 40,000bpd into various petroleum products.

Construction work on the first phase is about 80 per cent complete.

Leading the Daily Graphic on a tour of the facility in Tema last Friday, the consultants said about two million tonnes of refined products would be produced when the plant was commissioned (test run) by December this year, ahead of operations.

The phase two, which is expected to increase production capacity by an additional 60,000bpd, would bring the plant’s total capacity to 100,000bpd and annual production increased to five million tonnes, in line with the country’s annual consumption demands, they said.

As of last year, Ghana’s annual domestic petroleum demand stood at 5.5 million tonnes, which meant heavy dependence on imports as a result of the inability of the state refinery to function at its optimum.

Site

Situated on a 100-acre land, the refinery will employ about 1,200 people.

The lead consultant, Mr Andoh, said the facility would have processing facilities for various petroleum products to meet the nation’s demand for petrol, diesel, aviation fuel and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

He said the refinery would also have storage facilities that could hold up to a month’s stock of crude oil.

According to him, the first phase of the modern refinery could compete with any advanced refinery anywhere in the world.

“Our objective is that a modern refinery in Ghana should be as efficient as one anywhere in the world because we are all buying crude oil at the same world price using the same resources,” he said.

“By the establishment of this strategic refinery, the national economy will no longer have to be dependent on energy imports, a move which we believe can stabilise fuel and commodity prices,” he added.

Safety

Given the refinery’s closeness to a community inhabited by hundreds of indigenous people from Tema, there are concerns over safety.

However, the consultants said the project took into consideration the safety and environmental impact on the community, saying those concerns had been properly addressed, with a re-engineering of the area done in a manner that would not pose any safety risk to residents.

Product quality

Mr Andoh revealed that to ensure that only quality products from the refinery would be available on the local market, desalters had been installed to remove salt, water and solid content from the crude oil to be processed.

Similarly, the refinery would have a desulfurisation unit that would allow for the removal of the sulphur content from the oil in production, in line with standard specifications, he said.

“The sulphur will be converted into sulphuric acid, a raw material which is key in the extraction of lithium, an important product in the battery production business,” he said.

Asked whether the new plant could process the country’s crude oil, Mr Andoh said it was built to refine any form of crude oil, including that from the country’s oil fields.

“It should be a great story for Ghana for its crude oil to be processed here in Ghana. One of the things we need to do is make sure Parliament will review the laws on the exportation of crude oil from the Ghanaian fields and make sure that a certain percentage will be refined locally for the benefit of the people,” he added.