The Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy is to launch new petroleum quality detecting digital laboratories and fuel analyzers worth 12 million Birr, Addis Fortune reported.

Biruk Birhanu, Acting Director of Petroleum Downstream Operation Regulatory Directorate at the Ministry told Fortune “The main objective of the project is to control fraud in petroleum supply and minimize petroleum quality problems by increasing the accessibility of laboratories as well as improving the regulating capacity of the directorate.”

The Ethiopian Petroleum Supply Enterprise that is used to detect the quality of imported petroleum and petroleum products is substituted by the Directorate upon the request of the Ministry.

The existing laboratories are incapable of detecting small amounts of other materials deceitfully added to the petroleum, a problem which will be kept away by the use of the new laboratories, Biruk noted.

The fuel analyzer equipment to be introduced, measures the density and temperature of petroleum simultaneously. Yet the existing system uses more than one piece of equipment such as an evaporation analyzer and flash point which measures the evaporation and firing degrees respectively. Contrary to the existing equipment, the new equipment is also able to immediately test a sample without waiting for it to settle, said Abebe Gizaw, Laboratory Expert at the Directorate.

17 companies had bought the bidding document to provide for the digital laboratory equipment, among which seven have passed the technical evaluation.

Reports confirm around 200 million Birr is lost in Ethiopia as a result of petroleum fraud and the government’s tax revenue loss due to estimated to be around 180 million Birr per year.

Source: Addis Fortune