Page 10 - AfrOil Week 16 2021

AfrOil POLICY AfrOil

New Tema refinery to be denied permit

GHANA GHANA’S Environmental Protection Agency scrapping the facility. Instead, he said, it will call
(EPA) said this week that a proposed new refin- on private sector support and turn TOR into one
ing project at Tema was unlikely to be built, of the best refineries in West Africa.
owing to environmental concerns. The pro- However, he sought to assuage potential con-
posed site of the Sentuo oil-processing plant cerns, noting that inviting private sector partici-
is in the Tema Newtown Waterland, a wetland pation “does not mean [the president] wants the
catchment of Chemu Lagoon. public sector to collapse.” He added: “TOR is a
Sentuo’s permit request was submitted in strategic national asset ... [We] will make sure it
December 2019 as part of a plan to build a plant goes from strength to strength.”
with a sour crude processing capacity of 30,000- The 56-year-old facility near Accra has
60,000 barrels per day (bpd). The chosen plot been operating at less than half of its nameplate
covers an area of 217 acres (87.8 hectares) that capacity over the past four years. It went offline
has been leased for a period of 60 years. in July 2020 after running out of crude reserves
According to correspondence between and only came back into operation in January of
the company and the Electricity Company of this year before being shut down again a month
Ghana, Sentuo had requested the relocation later.
of two electricity pylons and was due to pay Prempeh said: “We want to see TOR export-
$190,000 for the work. ing crude from Ghana that has been refined.”
The EPA has identified the area as a wetland He went to say that refining crude domestically
and a buffer zone for flooding, adding that the rather than exporting it as a raw material was
area is too close to Tema Newtown and would “where the money is to be made”.
add to existing congestion. Later in March, a source was quoted by
As a result, the EPA’s executive director S&P Global Platts as saying: “The refinery has
Henry Kokofu told local media outlet Citi resumed processing after days of some mainte-
News: “We found [the project] not to be com- nance to correct some few issues.” ™
patible with the location. Even though we are yet
to communicate our findings … the possibility
that we will not grant it is quite high given the
evidence available to us.”
Tema is the location of Ghana’s only exist-
ing refinery, the struggling Tema Oil Refinery
(TOR).
In March, Ghanaian Energy Minister Mat-
thew Opoku Prempeh said the 45,000 bpd facil-
ity was “not in a healthy state”, referring to efforts
to bring it back to capacity following an explo-
sion at its distillation unit in early 2017.
He also said that Accra had no intention of The building site is within an environmentally sensitive location (Image: Ghana EPA)

Nigeria reportedly revises

PIB to cut tax, royalty rates

NIGERIA NIGERIA’S government has reportedly agreed instead of 7.5%, and will also fix the royalty rate
to revise provisions of the Petroleum Industry for new production streams from deepwater oil-
Bill (PIB), the oil and gas law now under discus- fields at 30%, instead of 42.5%, they said.
sion in the National Assembly. Additionally, the sources reported, the
Sources closely involved with the legislation changes made to the PIB guarantee that all assets
told Reuters last week that Abuja had acceded currently owned by Nigerian National Petro-
to requests from international oil and gas com- leum Corp. (NNPC) will be transferred to a
panies (IOCs) for reductions in royalty and tax limited liability company once the new law takes
rates. As a result, the PIB is now slated to set the effect. The transfer is expected to help IOCs col-
hydrocarbon tax rate for converted leases at 5%, lect debts owed by NNPC, Reuters noted.

P10 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 16 21•April•2021