GHANA: GPHA awards $2.5bn expansion project

The Ghana Ports & Harbours Authority (GPHA) is expected to award contracts worth $2.5billion through 2018 to double capacity, handle larger ships and reduce waiting time for vessels.

Government has given 18 companies from around the world a deadline of January 27, 2014 to present technical and financial bids for five stages of expansion at Tema and Takoradi ports, Paul Asare Ansah, Head of Marketing and Public Relations at the GPHA noted in an interview on November 18. He declined to name the bidders.

Capacity for twenty-foot equivalent containers at Tema, which handles about 90 percent of the nation’s traffic, will double to 2 million (twenty-foot equivalent units) TEUs a year by 2018, he said. Tema is located 30 kilometers (19 miles) east of Accra, the capital.

Ghana has already awarded contracts valued at about $470 million for the first stage of expansion at Tema and Takoradi, 218 kilometers west of Accra.

About 197 million Euros ($265 million) in financing has come from KBC Groep NV and the agency will seek about $200 million from the $3 billion China Development Bank loan Ghana got in 2011, Ansah said. The agency will determine how it will raise the rest of the funding after it reviews proposals next year, he said.

The extra 745 million cedis ($329 million), which the government will raise from increasing the Value-Added Tax to 15 percent from 12.5 percent, will be used for an infrastructure fund, Finance Minister Seth Terkper said on November 19. Traffic at Tema rose five-fold to 822,131 TEUs last year from 2000, according to data on the agency’s website.

Allowing deeper vessels to enter the port will boost trade revenue by $490 million, according to an African Center for Economic Transformation report. Takoradi Port handles oil exports from the offshore Jubilee field operated by London-based Tullow Oil Plc.

(TLW) output will more than double to 250,000 barrels a day in 2021 from about 102,000 barrels this year, according to the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).

The projects include dredging of channels to allow deeper ships to enter, building a base for oil operations and for the bulk handling of bauxite, manganese and clinker or Portland Cement. Takoradi handled 60,746 TEUs last year, a 48 percent increase from 2003, according to the earliest available data on the authority’s website.