Nigeria’s first off-shore petroleum products terminal would be commissioned this weekend by President Mohammadu Buhari.
Located in the Lekki Free Zone, the terminal, owned by
Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, is an ultra-modern purpose-built products intake,
storage and off-take facility conceptualised to revolutionise the Nigerian
downstream oil and gas industry by enabling the direct delivery of petroleum
products from large vessels which would otherwise have been unable to berth
anywhere on the Nigerian coastline.
The project concept was set to improve the efficiency of the
Nigerian downstream industry by eliminating the need for expensive vessel
lightering, reducing the incidence of demurrage for visiting mother vessels,
reducing the typical out turn losses which typically occur during lightering
operations, among other strategic objectives.
Speaking to journalists on the project, the Managing
Director of Pinnacle Oil and Gas, Mr Peter Mba, explained the rationale for the
project saying, “We noticed that the conventional operations of moving
petroleum products from ships to tank farms were sub-optimal involving a lot of
multiple handling.
“The procedures have been very inefficient, bringing in
cargoes in large tankers, keeping that large tanker in the middle of the sea
and then going with shuttle vessels to
lighter (tranship) from the large tanker because we couldn’t take the large
tanker to the port due to shallow draft restriction.
“To empty the mother vessel, it will require you to do a
minimum of 32 days of such shuttling. So
we then designed and created a liquid bulk terminal in an open sea, and with
the new infrastructure the operation now takes just two days, because you just
connect the mother vessel to our terminals directly.
“So it reduces the demurrage cost the industry was incurring
on the mother vessel and the cost of hiring the shuttle vessel.”
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