ENERGY : TOR resumes production

The Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) is set to restart its plant for production on  Wednesday after a four-week period of inactivity at its production lines.

This follows the successful discharge of some 600,000 barrels of crude from the Nippon Princess vessel that had been in dock at the Tema Port for the past five weeks.

The delivery of the consignment valued at $54 million dollars was necessitated by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) who gave TOR a waiver on its Single Obligon Limit (SOL) regulation that restricts one commercial bank from granting loans of more than GH¢16 million to TOR.

Until the approval, TOR was finding it difficult to raise letters of credit (LCs) to cover the cost of the consignment which was procured from Nigeria through an open market arrangement by the refinery’s management.

The production of the consignment would, however, last three weeks, and this workers fear may result in another shut down should government fail to guarantee an alternative arrangement to ensure frequent procurement of crude oil.

An official source at the refinery told the Daily Graphic that the Crude Distillation (CDU) plant was expected to resume production of the crude oil tomorrow, whereas the restart of the Residual Crude Catalytic Cracker (RFCC) would be delayed to allow the CDU generate enough stock of atmospheric residue (AR) which was the RFCC’s major raw material processed into Liquefied Petroluem Gas (LPG), gasoline, crack residue fuel for industries as well as light and heavy cycle oil among other products.

The shut down of the RFCC and CDU which were carried out on June 30 and July 25, 2011 respectively was as a result TOR’s inability to establish letters of credit (LCs) from its bankers to purchase crude oil for production.

Meanwhile workers have expressed worry at government’s inability to ensure TOR had access to crude oil from the Jubilee fields for production.

Daily Graphic