The Chamber of Oil Marketing Companies has unveiled a rebranding initiative aimed at amplifying its impact and maximising efforts.

According to Riverson Oppong, CEO and Industry Coordinator of the Chamber, this strategic move is not a change in identity but rather a deliberate shift towards optimizing the organization’s endeavours.

Speaking at the rebranding ceremony, Oppong emphasized that the initiative is designed to enhance the Chamber’s effectiveness, building on its achievements over the years.

“So the rebranding is not any change in identity but it’s a change towards maximising our efforts that we’ve showcased for the past years,” he explained.

“The rebranding today from an association to a chamber shows our effort to stakeholder engagement, advocacy, and championing the oil and gas marketing companies in terms of industrial performance and also making sure that the standards and operations of the industries are met in accordance with the regulators.

So this forms part of not only the operational side of our activities as a chamber now but most importantly the strategic part of our mission and vision,” he said.

Riverson furthered that, “apparently, when it comes to the shortage of fuel in the market, we would rather align with the importation of fuel. The shortage that we envisaged in the past few weeks had to do with the shortcomings from the Gold for Oil. The delivery and the supply of fuel were not forthcoming, and you realized that the BDCs or the Bulk Distributors were reluctant in importing fuel with the kind of standard and the regime where we were operating. There were two incidents that warranted that: the first one had to do with the Gold for Oil as I mentioned, and also with Certio crude oil refinery in the market.”

“…We don’t want to have a surge of petroleum products in the market, so there is this kind of check and balance. But when we had the Certio not working or not refining and when we had a shortage of supply from Gold for Oil, that warranted what we had.”

According to Riverson Oppong, the Chamber of Oil Marketing Companies will soon embark on a stakeholder engagement and dialogue initiative. This collaborative effort aims to address and mitigate the impact of potential inflows, ensuring a more stable and resilient industry.

He said, “So going forward as a chamber, this is where we need to have dialogues and engagement with stakeholders like BOST, who is championing the Gold for Oil as a recipient of the product, and also the NPA, the regulator, to see that and to make sure that even though there are inflows of certain products based on certain policies, when there’s a futuristic or forecasted or anticipated shortage, we should have a remediation to take care of that.”

“In my remarks, I mentioned that next year we are having the Downstream Dialogue, and the Downstream Dialogue is going to have, I mean, it’s not going to be a conference, so it’s not going to be like GCON, which is a conference for policy direction. Here it’s going to be industry CEOs and MDs meeting to discuss issues and finding stringent solutions to solve them. So that’s going to be one of them, and we’re going to have, we are bringing back, which we didn’t do this year, we’re going to bring back our Safety Week, which we didn’t have this year like I said, and also going to have a lot of engagements with stakeholders to address all the issues that we have.

Yes, we’re going to come up strongly this time around,” he emphasized.



VKB/OGB