By Alistair Thomson and Kwasi Kpodo
TEMA, Ghana, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Ghana plans to transform its second port of Takoradi into an oil services hub to meet demand when the country starts pumping offshore crude in two years' time, its ports chief said.
The West African country is also looking to double container handling capacity at the main port of Tema by building a new terminal as it cashes in on growing transhipment and transit demand from landlocked Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
Tullow Oil
"With the coming of the oil, we've decided to concentrate on oil services in Takoradi," Ben Owusu-Mensah, director-general of Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority, told Reuters on Thursday in Tema, the country's biggest port and an industrial centre.
Takoradi handles bulk exports such as loose cocoa beans,
manganese ore and bauxite, mined there by Rio Tinto
"We have started talking to people who are coming to do rig repairs, we are talking to people who want to come and build jetties and platforms for supply vessels. We are talking to people who even want to build new ports ... to handle the oil services," he said in an interview.
The ports authority had already built a dry dock and slipway at Takoradi, but further development, as well as plans for a new container terminal at Tema would have to wait for a feasibility study due to be completed by March 2009, Owusu-Mensah said.
Ghana is already the world's second biggest cocoa grower and Africa's No. 2 gold miner, and the coming of oil has raised expectations for economic growth and increased international interest in Sunday's election of a new president.
EXPANSION
Owusu-Mensah's office overlooks Ghana's main port, Tema, where new cranes quietly unloaded 40-foot containers from a ship onto waiting trucks and sweating, shirtless labourers arranged sacks of Brazilian sugar onto wagons for transport inland.
"This port used to be like a market. We have tightened security," Owusu-Mensah said, flicking between views of the port via closed circuit TV fed direct to his desktop computer.
In the port precinct where locals used to gather and goods would regularly be stolen, now uniformed security guards with electric stun batons search anyone entering or leaving.
Like other ports in the region, Owusu-Mensah said Tema had benefited "massively" from the 2002-03 civil war in neighbouring Ivory Coast, which displaced large volumes of freight headed for the landlocked Sahel countries of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
Cargo figures on display in the port headquarters show total tonnage through Tema was nearly 8.4 million tonnes in 2007, down from a peak of over 9.2 million in 2005 and less than half the 21.3 million Ivory Coast's main port Abidjan handled in 2007.
But Tema's container traffic has been growing fast, and container facilities intended to handle 400,000 twenty-foot container equivalent (TEU) handled 489,147 TEU last year.
If given the go-ahead after the feasibility study due in March, a port extension with a new container terminal should double Tema's container volume.
Owusu-Mensah said he expected Tema to retain much of the trade it had won from Abidjan, despite efforts to reunite Ivory Coast's rebel north and government south and hold elections.
"I don't foresee a drastic reduction in the levels despite the fact that Ivory Coast is coming back," he said. (Editing by Peter Blackburn)