Head of Quality Control at the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), Ubeidalah Saeed, has announced that the Authority is sanctioning the labeling of petrol pumps based on their octane grades.

This decision comes in response to recent concerns about the quality of petrol sold at pumps. Ghanaians have reported damaged spark plugs, attributing the issues to substandard petrol in the market.

Saeed emphasized that there is no tainted petrol on the market but suggested that vehicle owners might be purchasing the wrong fuel for their cars.

He explained as follows; “There are a lot of things that causes a car to jerk; one critical thing is octane level. So when a car vehicle starts to jerk, your first option is to look at the octane level of the fuel.

“It costs about 500 dollars to test for octane so we started testing for octane and realised that all the petrol we’re testing were meeting the octane levels and each of these vehicles have a minimum octane level that the fuel should meet to enable optimal performance.

“And another important point is that every particular car is designed for a certain grade of fuel so in fact the NPA at our last management meeting has sanctioned that next year we’re going to label the pumps for petrol to grade them on octane levels.

“So Ghana we have two grades of petrol, RON 91 which is the red one and the new one which is green. So a lot of people will buy it and think that it’s diesel but that’s a high grade petrol called premium petrol which is RON 95 for high performing vehicles.”