The ATT Tanjung Bin oil terminal, located in southern Malaysia, is planning a dry run of operations in the first week of March and start-up of fuel oil operations in the third week of the month, a spokesman for terminal owner VTTI said Monday.
Middle distillates and light-end operations would then follow in the first week of April, he added.
The new terminal will have an initial storage capacity of 841,000 cubic meters over 41 tanks, though a second stage could add an additional 820,000 cu m. Work on the second phase has not yet started, though 20 hectares of land at the site has been cleared for the expansion.
The terminal has five berths, with the largest able to accommodate a VLCC, with maximum draft of 17 meters. Further berths could be added as part of the second phase of the project, the VTTI spokesman said.
The jetty carries four, 30-inch fuel oil pipelines and an additional six, smaller pipelines for clean products. Fuel oil can be loaded at a rate of 7,500 cu m/hour, the spokesman said, middle distillates at 7,000 cu m/hour and light ends at 5,500 cu m/hour.
Work on the terminal's fuel oil tanks is complete, the VTTI spokesman said, while work on the middle distillates and gasoline tanks, jetty and berths are also mostly finished. The bulk of work remaining is focused on connecting the network of pipelines, he said.
The terminal is located to the west of the key Asian oil hub of Singapore, where land available for new terminal projects is scarce.
VTTI is a 50/50 joint venture between Swiss trader Vitol and Malaysian shipping company MISC. The company operates a number of terminals and tank operations around the world, but the Tanjung Bin terminal is its "largest-ever construction project," the company has said previously.
Vitol announced plans for the new terminal in September 2008, after it signed a long-term lease for the project land. A year later, in August 2009, it announced a joint venture agreement with MISC covering the Tanjung Bin terminal, and a year after that the sale of a 50% stake in VTTI to the Malaysian company.
Petco, the trading arm of Malaysian oil company Petronas, holds a lease to 100,000 cubic meters of storage at Tanjung Bin, while Vitol holds the lease for the remainder. However, the company is able to sublease some of that capacity out to other companies, a source close to the matter said.
