Ghana to build second oil refinery

Ghana plans to build a second oil refinery close to the current Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), President John Dramani Mahama said here late Monday.

According to him, the proposed 100,000 barrel per stream day (bpsd) is based on the vision to make Ghana the hub of downstream petroleum in West Africa.

TOR, Ghana's only refinery, is state-owned and has a 60,000 bpsd capacity, which meets only 50 percent of the country's daily consumption.

The refinery has been debt-ridden over the past 10 years, which as at the end of 2015, totaled 1.9 billion Ghana cedis or 498.03 million U.S. dollars.

Successive governments have slapped a TOR debt recovery levy on petroleum products in a bid to redeem the debt which keeps ballooning.

This debt, according to the president, is soon to be converted into bonds to be listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE).

"We are going to refurbish your storage tanks and expand the amount of petroleum products that we can produce and store. We will ramp up this refinery to its maximum of 60,000 bpsd and then we will start the planning of a new 100,000 bpsd per day refinery," the president told workers of TOR while touring the facility.

Mahama assured workers that government would not be complacent, but would ensure that the right things continued to be done to consolidate the turn-around.