State-owned Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) has moved to increase its regular stock of petroleum products by 22 per cent to around 1.33 million tonnes for crude and refined oil combined to cope with the country's mounting oil requirements, officials said.
"New oil storage tanks with the capacity of 240,000 tonnes would be built at Moheshkhali Island in the Bay of Bengal under its planned single point mooring (SPM) project," a senior BPC official told the FE Thursday.
Of the new oil storage tanks, three tankers would have crude oil storage capacity of 50,000 tonnes each while three others would have diesel storage capacity of 30,000 tonnes each, he said.
Currently, the BPC has a total of 24 oil storage tanks across the country with oil storage capacity of around 1.09 million tonnes of petroleum products, crude and refined oil combined.
The official said the government of Bangladesh is now in final talks with China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau (CPPB), a Chinese petroleum firm, for implementing the much-needed SPM project along with setting up of pipeline and oil storage tanks at a cost of around US$ 700 million.
As per the plan, BPC will install two 18-kilometre long and 36-inch diameter pipelines from the SPM, to be built in deep offshore in the Bay of Bengal, to carry both crude and refined petroleum products and store them in tanks nearby Moheshkhali Island.
Two separate pipelines with 92km in length and 18-inch diameter would be set up in parallel from Moheshkhali to Chittagong oil depot to carry crude and refined oil separately from oil storage tanks, he said.
Officials said it would help BPC deal with any sudden or unexpected oversupply of petroleum products and save the state-run corporation paying demurrage to oil-carrying cargoes.
BPC was struggling with oversupply of imported furnace oil over the past several months as its main consumer Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) was not taking a committed quantity of fuel, BPC chairman AM Badrudduja had claimed.
BPC's furnace oil import had then exceeded its storage capacity of around 100,000 tonnes, pushing the firm to stop unloading of fuel from new cargoes.
BPC had to pay demurrage to several foreign cargoes at US$ 15,000 per day for their stay over the usual permissible period of 108 hours at the port jetty in Chittagong, he said.
The volume of Bangladesh's oil import has been increasing significantly as the country has been reducing its dependency on natural gas for power generation by setting up dozens of oil-fired power plants.
BPC has set an import target at around 5.81 million tonnes of crude and refined oil products in 2015, up 7.59 per cent from 2014, at a cost of around $ 5 billion.
mazizur.rahman@outlook.com
