Author: Prince Agyapong, Energy & Extractives Journalist

Ghana is an oil-producing nation that exports every single barrel of crude it lifts and then spends billions of dollars importing the refined petroleum products its citizens need to function.

It is one of the most striking paradoxes in African energy economics, and it is not accidental. It is the product of deliberate technical, contractual, and economic choices that have locked the country into a structural dependency it has yet to break.

The Chamber of Oil Marketing Companies’ (COMAC) 2025 industry report on Ghana’s petroleum supply and consumption trends lays bare the full cost of this arrangement, and the numbers demand a national conversation.

Ghana’s oil and gas import bill has consistently represented between 30 and 32 percent of the country’s total import expenditure, one of the single largest categories in the national import structure.

According to COMAC’s report, sourced from the Bank of Ghana database, that bill reached an estimated $4.95 billion in 2025, up from $4.63 billion in 2024, a 6.9 percent year-on-year increase. In 2023, the figure stood at $4.48 billion.

The trajectory is unambiguous. Ghana is spending more every year to import the very fuel it could theoretically be producing domestically. And while crude oil export revenues partially offset this cost, those earnings are declining sharply, dropping an estimated 32.7 percent from $3.87 billion in 2024 to approximately $2.61 billion in 2025.

The trade arithmetic is becoming increasingly unfavourable, and the structural reasons behind it run deep.

The Refinery Problem: Why TOR Cannot Process Ghana’s Own Crude

The first and most fundamental reason Ghana exports all of its crude lies in a technical mismatch that has persisted for decades. The crude produced from Ghana’s flagship fields — Jubilee, TEN, and Sankofa — is light and sweet.

The Tema Oil Refinery, by contrast, was historically configured and built to process heavy or sour crude. It simply lacks the appropriate infrastructure to refine the type of crude Ghana produces.

The consequence is a self-defeating cycle: Ghana lifts premium-grade light sweet crude, ships it abroad, then spends foreign exchange importing heavier refined products or processed fuels from overseas refineries.

The refinery that should sit at the heart of the country’s energy sovereignty has, for structural reasons, been excluded from the equation entirely.

Contractual Handcuffs: What the Petroleum Agreements Allow

Beyond the technical constraints, the contractual architecture of Ghana’s upstream petroleum agreements further limits the country’s ability to redirect crude for domestic refining.

Under existing agreements, the State, primarily through the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation receives only a limited share of production through royalties, which typically range between five and twelve percent, supplemented by windfall taxes, additional oil entitlements, and an initial carried interest of approximately 15 percent.

Critically, these agreements contain stabilisation and economic equilibrium clauses that restrict the government’s ability to revise contract terms over their 25-year lifespan.

International oil companies operating Ghana’s fields also carry pre-committed supply obligations tied to the financing of upstream development, obligations that structurally restrict any diversion of crude to the domestic market.

The State’s aggregate entitlement, in short, is insufficient to meet Ghana’s domestic fuel demand even if TOR were capable of processing it.

The Economic Logic: Exporting Premium, Importing Cheap

Underpinning everything is a straightforward economic calculation. Ghana’s light sweet crude commands a premium price on international markets.

Exporting it and using the proceeds to import cheaper heavy crude or refined products has, under current conditions, generated greater net value than refining domestically.

As COMAC’s report notes, “the earned value for exporting our crude is greater than the value for refining in-country, given the current state of affairs.”

That logic, however rational in isolation, obscures a longer-term cost. A country that perpetually exports its primary resource raw and reimports the processed derivative accumulates neither industrial capability nor energy sovereignty.

The 6.9 percent annual rise in Ghana’s oil import bill is not just a fiscal statistic — it is a measure of deepening structural dependency.

The 2025 Warning Sign

The sharpest signal in COMAC’s 2025 data is not the rising import bill, it is the collapse in crude export earnings. A 32.7 percent decline in crude oil export revenue, from $3.87 billion in 2024 to an estimated $2.61 billion in 2025, dramatically narrows the offset against import costs.

Ghana is now spending significantly more to import refined fuel than it is earning from exporting crude, a balance of payments dynamic that will only worsen if left unaddressed.

The case for accelerating TOR’s reconfiguration, fast-tracking private refinery investment, and renegotiating the terms of upstream petroleum agreements where legally possible has never been more urgent.

Ghana does not lack oil. It lacks the infrastructure and contractual freedom to use it. Until that changes, the paradox will persist, and the import bill will keep climbing.