NPA To Install Automatic Tank Gauges At Retail Outlets

National Petroleum Authority, NPA has indicated that its outfit will soon embark on the installation of Automatic Tank Gauges to allay the fears and speculations surrounding the shortage of fuel products as a result of the hike in fuel prices.

The Head of Quality Assurance, Saeed Kutia Ubeidalah, who announced this explained that per the NPA’s assessment, currently there is enough stock of fuel products in the country but the NPA is not relenting on its guards, adding that it is working hard to reveal it schedule of products into the country so that where there is low stock, it can restock.

He said this during a media and the NPA’s stakeholders engagement in Koforidua, the Eastern Regional capital over the weekend, to access its performance and measures it needs to adopt going forward.

He added that “the NPA is installing what we call the Automatic Tank Gauges into the underground storage tanks of retail outlets which will let us determine your availability of fuel sitting for office so some of these technologies have helped us to sit and determined which stations have how much quantities of fuel that’s why we could have confidently told you that certain products or currently we do not have a shortage of any of those products because we are able to compute the figures available”.

“We have over 98% pass rate so specifications are one of the lowest in the world, not in Africa, not in West Africa because fuel adulteration is a worldwide phenomenon so if you can have over 98% worldwide phenomenons you and that was the reason why I said right from 2017 with the inception of the fifty together” he added.

“We are having the best quality because we have a stringent monitoring system and we have data that suggests that based on the quality specifications we found we have the best so based on quality specifications, we are doing very well,” he said.

Abyss Ibrahim Tasunti, who is the Head of Economic Regulation was quite skeptical that government will be able to squeeze the price of crude oil since the formulae used to set the price of petroleum products in Ghana has no direct relationship with the oil that is produced in the country.

He also said, “crude oil production is a source of revenue for the government, it is not directly linked to the formulae so what a government could do is to use its share of the crude oil it gets and if you check the records, you will notice that Ghana does not own 100% of the crude oil that is produced in Ghana, about 18% from the contract we’ve seen is what government gets from the crude oil we produce in the country, and base on our 2021 data”.

He added that “Ghana produce as a whole about 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day and 18% of that translate to about 27,000 barrels per day, but as a country, all our petroleum products consumption is about 96,000 barrel per day so if Ghana is getting about 27,000 barrels as it shares of crude oil production in the country”.
“And you consume over 96,000 barrels per day you can see that there is a wide gap and therefore even if the government is to decide to give all its crude oil for free and to translate it into pricing it will not be able to make up for any significant impact on our price”.

But he further suggested that even though most governments have policies on how to intervene in pricing but if the government wants to intervene in subsidizing crude oil pricing, it would have to look at whether it is making enough revenue from its shared crude oil produced.

He further noted that the introduction of the automation system at the landing beaches will help to eliminate the intermittent shortage of premix fuel at the landing beaches.