A Lecturer with the Institute for Oil and Gas Studies at the University of Cape Coast, Dr. Shafic Suleman says revamping the Tema Oil Refinery and building more refineries in Ghana is the way to go as the country faces a looming fuel shortage.
The hint of the looming fuel shortage was contained in a Bloomberg report which indicated that Ghana is likely to face such a situation as the central bank rations dollars after oil prices surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The report says the monthly fuel import bill for Ghana jumped to 450 million dollars in May, from 250 million dollars in January.
The central bank is only offering about 100 million dollars a month at its foreign exchange auctions, and licensed bulk distributors can no longer plug the shortfall in the black market, the report said.
However, Dr. Suleman, speaking exclusively to ATL FM NEWS stressed that refining our own crude oil will help curtail the alarming fuel shortage, reduce the burden on the economy and help the cedi to dollar rate.
“We have been talking about it for a very long time that we need to refine our own crude oil. So instead of buying refined petroleum products that have a lot of burden on our economy and the cedi to the dollar, we should have been buying crude oil like one million barrels or fifty million barrels and we kind of store it and be refining it in bits for our domestic market, which is the basic thing.”
According to him, this is the long-term internal mechanism Ghana can adopt to address the looming fuel shortage adding that “every rational growing economy has within it refineries.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Suleman states that getting enough dollars to buy refined petroleum products will serve as the immediate solution to the problem.
Giving more explanation on the issue at stake – the threat of a fuel shortage as the Central Bank rations dollars, he said “the main issue is about the auctioning of the dollar to this BDC so that instead of going to the market to buy the dollar, we will go and buy these refined products then central bank will auction them out so that there can be a mechanism to actually manage the dollar to cedi fluctuation.”
He however urges the Central Bank to find better ways of using the dollar to manage the supply of fuel in the country.
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Source: Rosemond Asmah/ATLFMNEWS
