The President Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd), will on Saturday, inaugurate the over $1bn products terminal belonging to Pinnacle Oil & Gas Limited.
The terminal with over one billion litre-capacity is located right inside the Lekki Free Trade Zone in Lagos.
Apart from the NNPC, which is the highest market supplier, Pinnacle is a major player in the downstream sub-sector with 23 per cent market share.
Speaking on the feat, the Company’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Peter Mbah, said the facility, which had both offshore intake facilities, sat on a water depth of 23 metres from the shore, with between 80-100 million litres capacity.
“What we are about to unveil on Saturday is an offshore intake facility. There are actually two offshore intake facilities. One sits on a water depth of 23 metres that has two cargo pipelines of 24-inch diameter. We also have the CBM, which sits at a water depth of 17 metres. It has two cargo pipelines of 16 diametres.
“Currently, the way the operations in the downstream work is that you have these large vessels which are unable to go to the port because the water channel is not deep enough for them to berth where the storage terminals are. What typically happens is that those mother vessels sit at the anchorage and wait there where daughter vessels are taken to them. A typical mother vessel has between 80-100 million litres capacity, while a daughter vessel does 15-20 million litres.
“For a mother vessel, the shuttle vessel would need to do a minimum of four voyages, and each takes an average of eight days to do one voyage. What we did was to observe these multiple handlings in operations, and designed facilities that disrupt those sub-optimisation and inefficiencies.
“So, the SPM, and CBM allow one to take the mother vessel in an open sea and discharge from that point to an offshore terminal storage using the subsea pipelines in just two days,” he said.
Further explaining the uniqueness of the terminal, Managing Director of the company, Robert Dickerman, said the location of the vessel would be of immense advantage to the Nigerian economy by drastically cutting down the usual products tanker gridlock experiences at Apapa.
“Those trucks coming to take products have no business coming into the Lagos metropolis but will come into the free zone and go out through Epe”, he said.
Dickerman said the company was mindful of safety and environment protection as the facility had an emergency shutdown mechanism in case of any accident.
“We are the first to build a CBM in the country,” he said, noting that the facility would save the country funds it would have spent on demurrages.
Mbah added that the facility had scaled through over 24 approvals, including approval from the Federal Executive Council.
“The project of this magnitude is beyond a ministerial approval, particularly because it has to do with the offshore and a pipeline in an open sea, not by the shore,” he said.
The facility also comprises 300 million litres of refined petroleum products storage comprising storage for petrol or Premium Motor Spirit as well as diesel or Automotive Gas Oil, a conventional buoy mooring facility (an offshore mooring system).
