TOR's distillation plant shut down because of crude oil shortage

Accra, Dec. 7, GNA - The Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) has enough crude stock to process in the next two months and does not anticipate any interruption in supplies during the Christmas and New Year period.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on Saturday, Dr Kwame Ampofo, Managing Director of TOR, debunked media reports that the Refinery shut down its distillation unit because it did not have crude oil to process. He explained that the distillation plant was shut temporarily last Monday to repair a faulty pump and also to create space between processed crude brought in by Ecobank last month and incoming stock.

The unit will be restarted on Monday, he said.

"I wish to state again that there is no cause for alarm -- The CDU (Crude Distillation Unit) developed a minor problem with one of its pumps, fortunately just at the time that it had finished processing the ERHA crude ringfenced by Ecobank," he said.

He said management took advantage of the situation and stopped the distillation unit to do two things -- repair the pump and ensure some time lag between incoming stock to achieve physical separation of the two parcels and prevent co-mingling of products.

The separation was necessary for accounting purposes, he explained. Dr Ampofo said at the time he was speaking to the GNA on Saturday, staff of the refinery were preparing to discharge 700,000 barrels of crude that had freshly been supplied by the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation. "We'll start processing this hopefully on Monday," he said, adding that additional two million barrels of crude was expected later in the evening to augment the stock.

"We're not at all in distress, so there is no need for panic," he reassured.

The 45,000 bpd (barrels per day) TOR was idled for most of 2009 due to a debt overhang of more than $600 million owed to the Ghana Commercial Bank, its main creditor and other service providers including crude suppliers. . To help solve the problem, the government in late October appointed Pan African Ecobank to help arrange a syndicated $600 million facility to refinance half of the debt owed to Ghana Commercial Bank and use the other $300 million to strengthen the refinery's balance sheet. The Refinery subsequently received its first crude oil in nearly 10 months last month with funding from Ecobank Ghana.

Dr Ampofo said while the refinery had yet to complete its recapitalisation, confidence in the plant's potential profitability had improved, adding that the plant would continue to buy the bulk of its crude oil from the spot market until January, when government-to-government supply deals with Nigeria, Libya and Sudan kick in. 7 Dec. 09