According to the Institute of Energy Security, the government is embarking on an unrealistic mission to find cheap, reliable fuel all over the world.
In his address on Sunday, October 30, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo stated that the government was working to secure reliable and consistent sources of affordable petroleum products for the Ghanaian market in order to stabilize fuel prices.
According to Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the government has tasked the Energy Ministry and the National Petroleum Authority (NPA) with finding reliable and cheaper fuel sources.
He said “The deregulated market we have here where BDCs import from big companies on high fees from the refinery wherever and bring them in is contributing to the quickened escalation of fuel prices.
“To arrest it, the Energy Ministry working through NPA and other agencies etc is been tasked to finding reliable, cheaper sources of fuel for the Republic so that the OMCs locally can tap into and hopefully halt that escalation in fuel prices.”
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The IES in a statement issued on Thursday November 3 said “Meanwhile, the search for that heavily discounted fuel price from elsewhere is an unrealistic hope, and the team may return empty handed, unless the expectation/request is exchanged with something valuable to the would-be supplier.
“If His Excellency the President and the handlers of Ghana’s Energy Ministry look within, they would find what they are desperately looking for from outside the country. Indeed the search for reliable and affordable source of petroleum products starts with the Tema Oil Refinery, which has been down since March 2021, due to lack of crude oil which is the refinery’s main raw material.
“It beats ones imagination how an oil producing country with a refinery capacity of 45,000 barrels per stream day (bpsd), would have it top government officials abandon its domestic competitive advantage, and rather seek to import refined petroleum product elsewhere, in the name of reliability and affordability.”
