Ghana’s downstream goals remain distant

The country is seeking investors to fund the rehabilitation of its only oil refinery, while confusion continues about plans for a new plant

Ghana’s refining infrastructure is limited to the 45,000bl/d Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) east of Accra, which has been plagued by issues for well over a decade. Several efforts to upgrade and expand the facility have been announced and subsequently aborted, and the refinery has repeatedly gone offline for months at a time owing to a supply shortages or technical problems, the most severe of which were caused by an explosion at the crude distillation unit (CDU) in early 2017. TOR was shut completely between July 2020 and January 2021 following outages at the CDU and fluid catalytic cracking units. These issues left only one of the CDU’s furnaces operational and reduced effective throughput capaci