By Innocent Obasi
The first offshore subsea petroleum products terminal in Nigeria, constructed by Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, is ready and will be commissioned by President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday, 22 October.
Peter Mbah, CEO, Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, an indigenous oil and gas company active across the entire downstream value chain, disclosed this on Tuesday while briefing journalists ahead of the forthcoming unveiling of the terminal.
Mbah said the terminal, located in the Lekki Free Zone, Lagos, is reputed to be the single largest fuel storage facility in the country. It is an ultra-modern facility designed to revolutionize Nigeria's downstream oil and gas industry by allowing the direct delivery of petroleum products from large ships that would otherwise be unable to berth anywhere on the country's coastline.
The facility, which was funded by a group of Nigerian banks, is also considered to serve as additional indication that the nation's financial institutions are ready to take on multibillion-dollar projects.
Although the facility was built with a fuel storage capacity 1.1 billion litres, it only started up with 300 million litres of refined petroleum products, which included storage for premium motor spirit (PMS) and diesel or automotive gas oil (AGO).
Described the facility in detail, Mbah said the terminal has a Conventional Buoy Mooring (CBM) facility, that is, an offshore mooring system with two units of 16-inch pipes, an 8km subsea products pipeline network, having a combined discharge flow rate of 1800 m3/hour.
Additionally, it has a Single Point Mooring (SPM) facility with two units of 24 inches of a 10km subsea product pipeline network with a combined discharge flow rate of 4,000 m3 per hour, as well as pumps and loading gantries systems with the capacity to truck out 20 million litres per day.
Robert Dickerman, managing director of the company, said that the facility will 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, and reducing the typical outturn losses that occur during lightering operations, among other things.
“All of these will result in significant savings for vessels berthing at the terminal as opposed to berthing at any of the other mooring facilities in the Lagos area. It will also reduce the turnaround time for discharging a mother vessel conveying between 80 million litres to 120 litres of petrol from about 32 days when using a ‘daughter vessel’ to two days on this new facility,” Dickerman said.
At its full operation, the facility is anticipated to significantly lessen, if not completely remove, the difficulties associated with trucking fuel out of the Apapa ports axis as a result of traffic congestion. Furthermore, given its capacity, it is anticipated to increase storage capacity for petroleum products in the country.