THE National Petroleum Authority (NPA), will by the close of this year colour kerosene and put identity markers on all petroleum products for easy indentification.
According to the regulator this would stem the rampant adulterations of the products by dealers which, it maintained causes numerous havoc to consumers.
Addressing a meeting of the Petroleum Retailers Association (PRA) in Accra, Mr Daniel Amoah, a Director of Pricing, Planning and Research at the NPA said the authority was always facing challenges on the quality and quantity of petroleum products in the country.
The meeting which was on the theme: “The role of the retailer in a deregulated petroleum industry” had the Executive Secretary of the NPA and the Director General of the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) as guest speakers.
Mr Amoah, who represented the Executive Secretary of the NPA said some of the products were always adulterated.
To forestall those actions and further protect consumers, the Director said “the NPA is going to colour kerosene as we have done to premix fuel. We would also introduce identity markers, a small quantity of a chemical put in the fuel, such that if you add even a drop of product ‘A’ into product ‘B’ the chemical would be able to show that product ‘A’ has been added to product ‘B”.
The NPA has for sometime now been grappling with issues of adulterations of the various petroleum products refined or imported into the country.
The authority has always maintained that less costly products like kerosene and premix fuel, which are mostly subsidised for rural folks are always added to the more costly ones like petrol and diesel by dealers as a way of maximising quantity and profit.
The authority last year coloured premix fuel, a product used for marine activities as a strategy to prevent its adulteration with other petroleum products such as petrol, diesel, kerosene by dealers.
He said anyone, be it tanker drivers, Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) or retailers who would be caught adulterating the various products after the measure was implemented “would be dealt with” .
The director called on OMCs to model their operations to be in line with the various laws governing the country’s petroleum sector.
“Your business models can’t change the laws of the petroleum sector but you can change your models to conform with the laws. This is our resolve and we would peruse it to the ultimate”, Mr Amoah cautioned the OMCs.
The President of the PRA, Mr Sylvester Apedu appealed to the NPA to compel the OMCs to pay the retailers their margins as was recently revised by the authority.
The verification of products delivered at the stations, according to the President also creates problems for them.
“Whereas the refinery and bulk traders use flow meters as instruments of measurement when loading products, we the retailers use the dipsticks to verify the volumes and this results in disagreements between drivers and retailers”, Mr Apedu said.
Mr Ade Acquah, Head of Material Science, at the Ghana Standard Board explained that while the retailers normally maintained that carrying the flow meters from the refinery to the stations by the tanker drivers could cause the calibrations to be altered, the tanker drivers also insist that dipsticks kept by retailers at their various stations could be tampered with.
The Managing Director of TOR Mr Ato Ampiah, who chaired the meeting pleaded with the NPA to collaborate with the necessary stakeholders to solve the problem.
He said “proactivity is what is needed to safe the petroleum industry from collapse. If we sit down and talk about trust, people would go home empty handed. The dipstick is too archaic to be talked about at this time”.
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