TOR embarks on moves to ensure operational reliability

THE Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) is currently engaged in critical efforts to strengthen operational reliability, embed global engineering standards and pursue partnerships that will modernise its refinery and improve national energy resilience, the Managing Director, Edmond Kombat, has said.

For him, the country needed engineers who were bold enough to innovate, ethical enough to uphold standards, and patriotic enough to use their skills to solve its most pressing challenges.

"As Managing Director of TOR, I am deeply aware that our country's industrial transformation from energy security to manufacturing, infrastructure, and digital innovation relies heavily on the competence and integrity of engineers.

“Your work forms the backbone of national development, ensuring that complex systems operate safely, reliably, and sustainably," he said.

Mr Kombat said this as guest speaker at the 39th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET-GH) in Accra last Thursday.

At the ceremony, the institution honoured Mr Kombat for the steps he had undertaken to revive TOR.

Also, the new President of IET-GH, Wonder Davor, was sworn into office following the end of tenure of the outgone president, Henry Kwadwo Boateng.

Mr Kombat said he got to TOR and realised that the refinery was in a very bad state and started doing a diagnostic of the situation and also a small fishbone analysis to be able to bring out the issues that the refinery was facing.

“We realised that the problem was not caused by engineers. As mentioned, it was caused by a lack of leadership. We inherited a refinery for six solid years that had no audited account, that had negative equity of GH¢8 billion - that had a debt of $517 million,” he explained.

He said there was high attrition rate among staff engineers who were in the refinery, leaving for the Middle East and Dangote's refinery. 

Mr Kombat later told journalists that the operation of TOR would transform the downstream sector greatly.

TOR, he said, was able to do between 45,000 to 55,000 barrels per stream day, representing about 45 per cent to 60 per cent of the country's needs.

"So, it means that you are not going to rely on the importation of finished products and what is also interesting is that TOR is able to refine the crude that we get from Ghana; the TEN and the Jubilee fields. In 2016, we did the pilot and it was successful," he said.

Beacon

“The refinery that was the beacon of excellence in Ghana, and even the sub-region, was a pale shadow of itself. But some of your team still believed that a better day would come.”

“So when we got the opportunity, we assembled them. We were able to analyse and tease out all the issues that needed to be done,” he said. 

Ghana, Mr Kombat said, needed engineers who were bold enough to innovate, ethical enough to uphold standards, and patriotic enough to use their skills to solve our most pressing challenges.

In his final AGM message, Mr Boateng, who served for four years, said the theme spoke succinctly to the reality that the country faced.

He said the world was shifting rapidly and that technology was evolving, mounting environmental pressure and changes in economic demands.

“In the midst of these global shifts, Ghana must find her place and that place can only be secured through engineering excellence,” he said.

Inefficiencies 

For too long, Mr Boateng said the country had witnessed inefficiencies within some state-owned enterprises that held so much promise in the past.

Many, he said, were underperforming not because of the lack of technical capability but because of lapses in leadership, weak engineering oversight and persistent greed and corruption, thereby crippling their potential.

Mr Boateng, who was honoured with a citation for his leadership over the years, said as engineers dedicated to national development, “This is a painful reality”.

“Where engineering excellence is ignored, development stalls, but where it is embraced, nations rise and Ghana has many examples of what excellence can achieve,” he said.

He said at the time when many had written off TOR, Mr Kombat and his engineering team demonstrated what integrity, driven leadership and technical discipline could accomplish.