We've been running ship agency, husbandry, and logistics work through Tema and Takoradi since 1986 — long enough to know how the ports actually behave, and long enough to have earned the conversations we get invited into.
Bulk Ship & Trade Ltd. (BSTL) is a Ghanaian shipping agency founded in 1986 and incorporated in its current form in 2002. We work with oil & gas majors, tanker and OSV operators, dry-bulk charterers, project cargo contractors, and local importers — anyone whose work touches a Ghanaian port.
The services break into four lines: ship agency (general and protective), husbandry, logistics and cargo, and brokerage. On any given day, most of the team is doing some combination of all four, because that's how port calls actually work. The operation is small enough that the people answering your emails are the same people on the jetty.
We hold the accreditations you'd expect from an agency working with international oil & gas clients, and we are audited against the standards those clients apply to their panels. None of this is decorative. When a principal asks who on our team is trained in ISPS or how our HSEQ documentation has evolved over the last two years, there is a specific person who picks up the phone.
Ghana's maritime trade runs through two deep-water ports — Tema in the east, Takoradi in the west — with a growing set of offshore oil & gas fields in the waters between them. We cover the full corridor.
Thirty kilometres east of Accra. Ghana's dominant container and break-bulk port, handling the majority of national imports, project cargo movements, and general trade flows. Busy at most hours, expanded in recent years to absorb growing volumes. A clean Tema call is a matter of preparation — documentation staged early, berth and labour lined up, customs engaged before vessel arrival.
Ghana's historical bulk port and today the principal oil & gas gateway. Closer to the Jubilee, TEN, and Sankofa offshore fields that have redrawn the country's energy industry since 2010. Different berth layout, different commercial rhythm, a different supply-boat operating pattern. Most of our oil & gas work runs through here.
OSVs, crew boats, tugs servicing the offshore fields; the husbandry and document flow that keeps them moving. Our offshore work is coordinated from Takoradi and executed with the same standards clients see in Tema. The crews are Ghanaian; the paperwork is international.
The industry we started in is not the industry we operate in today. In 1986, Ghanaian shipping was largely a general-trade business — agricultural exports, manufactured imports, the occasional tanker. Tema handled most of it. Documentation was paper, communication was telex, and a good agent was mostly a person with a clipboard and an address book.
The book is different now. Electronic document flows, port community systems, real-time vessel tracking. Oil & gas majors brought audited HSEQ regimes, detailed disbursement scrutiny, and a much higher tolerance for asking questions. Charterers expect transparency that would have seemed intrusive a generation ago. All of this is an improvement.
What hasn't changed is the underlying craft. A port call is still a choreography of weather, tides, authorities, labour, and paperwork. It still rewards people who prepare in advance and surface problems before they become surprises. The tools are better; the discipline is the same.
A company has an origin, a set of people running it, and a reason it got into this business in the first place. Those belong on their own pages rather than squeezed in here.
What we're trying to do and why. Fewer abstractions than you'd expect — more about what "integrity" and "excellence" actually look like at 2am on an anchorage call.
Read our missionFrom a 1986 startup through the 2002 relaunch as BSTL to the Jubilee era and everything after. The chapters that shaped how we work today.
The full timelineThe people who actually run the business — what they came from, what they own, and who picks up the phone when a principal needs an answer.
Meet the teamCore values are easy to write and hard to do. Here's what ours actually show up as.
Disbursement accounts with the vouchers attached. No mystery line items. If we got something wrong, the exception appears on the update before you ask about it.
Documentation staged before arrival. Authorities briefed ahead of time. The difference between a 36-hour port call and a 96-hour one lives in a hundred small decisions made two days earlier.
The phone gets answered. Not during business hours — in general. A master's 3am medevac call is why husbandry exists; the rest of the time it's just good manners.
HSEQ as a daily operational discipline, not a compliance document. Community investment where we actually operate, not where the photography looks best.
If you're scoping a port call, a husbandry arrangement, or a long-term agency relationship in Ghana, start a short conversation with us. The first response costs nothing and usually saves something.
Contact Our Team