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The Tema Oil Refinery has a throughput capacity of 45,000 bpd (Image: TOR)

Investor calls on Accra to form JV

to rehabilitate Tema Oil Refinery

GHANA THE head of a Ghanaian investment firm has for the country rather than simply exporting it.
called on the country’s government to form a In February, Minister for Public Enterprises
joint venture (JV) with international oil compa- Joshua Cudjoe said Ghana was seeking strategic
nies (IOCs) for the rehabilitation of the Tema Oil partners willing to provide the capital required
Refinery (TOR). to rehabilitate TOR, which requires extensive
Speaking during a forum in Accra on artifi- repair work. “Given the revenue constraints that
cial intelligence and sustainable development, the state has at the moment and capitalisation
Dr Chris Kpodar, chairman and CEO of Solo- of TOR to enable it to turn around, the Finance
mon Investments Ghana, said that outsourcing Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, would let you know,
some of the responsibility for the repair work and I support that we won’t use tax money to go
presented a “win-win” solution. and fix it,” he said.
The 45,000 barrel per day (bpd) facility has Reports in May 2021 suggested that the refin-
been plagued by problems since an explosion at ery had depleted all of its feedstock, with opera-
its crude distillation unit (CDU) in early 2017 tions halted for maintenance and repairs.
and was closed completely from July 2020 to Jan- Meanwhile, state utility ECG said last
uary 2021. Its CDU and fluid catalytic cracking December that it had cut electricity supplies to
units have suffered outages, and only one of the TOR following the facility’s failure to pay $4.3mn
CDU’s furnaces is currently operational, bring- of debt. “We’ve pursued [TOR] for some time to
ing the 56-year-old facility’s effective throughput pay the bill, but unfortunately, all our [efforts
capacity down to 30,000 bpd. were] not yielding, so we were compelled to cut
Kpodar said Ghana would benefit from ties the lines,” according to the leader of a taskforce
to IOCs via knowledge transfer in the imple- set up to recover the missing payment. He added
mentation of the latest technologies and by lev- that ECG would restore power only if the state
eraging Ghanaian crude to create further value refinery paid at least 30% of the debt. ™

Lekoil Nigeria secures court

injunction against asset transfer

NIGERIA LEKOIL Nigeria Ltd has secured an injunction making any move to transfer their interests in
against Lekoil Ltd and a subsidiary of Savannah Lekoil’s Nigerian assets. The injunction also bars
Energy Plc, a UK-based independent energy them from altering ownership, equity or capital
company, that prevents the two companies from structure.

P6 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 14 06•April•2022