Leading downstream firm, Pinnacle Oil and Gas Ltd has completed a first-of-its-kind petroleum products terminal off the coast of Lagos that would allow for intake and offtake of refined petroleum products from mother vessels through an undersea pipeline to its terminal in Lekki.
The facility which was conceived in 2011 gulped over $1billion worth of investments from a consortium of local and international lenders and required multiple approvals up to the Federal Executive Council and earned the company a local content award for the liberal use of local skill.
The Pinnacle Lekki petroleum products Terminal is an ultra-modern purpose-built products intake, storage, and offtake 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 facility is a game changer as it eliminates the need for expensive vessel lightering, reduces the incidence of demurrage for visiting mother vessels, cuts losses that typically occur during lightering operations, and leads to significant savings for vessels berthing at the Terminal as opposed to berthing at any of the other mooring facilities in the Lagos area.
The current system sees large vessels unable to get to the ports because of the draft restrictions, as the water channel is not deep enough for them to offload their cargo into storage terminals. So the mother vessel sits at the anchorage, and smaller vessels, called daughter vessels, come in to evacuate the products for onward delivery to the storage terminals.
Peter Mbah, CEO of Pinnacle Oil & Gas Limited said the process was inefficient and costly.
It would take a small vessel with a 20m litres capacity would do four voyages to evacuate a mother vessel bearing 80m litres of petrol. Each voyage takes 8 days to complete and would require 32 days in total.
With Pinnacle’s solution, the entire process takes a mere 24 hours, the extra day is to complete regulatory formalities.
“What we did in Pinnacle was to observe these multiple handlings in the operating space and design facilities that disrupt those suboptimisation and inefficiencies,” he said.
Pinnacle’s solution is to build a Conventional Buoy Mooring (CBM) Facility, essentially an offshore Mooring System with two 16inch, 8km subsea products pipeline network. The system has a combined discharge flow rate of 1800m3/hr. The company also built a Single Point Mooring (SPM) facility with two 24inch,10km subsea products pipeline network with combined discharge flow rate of 4,000m3/hr.
The CBM which includes 4 individual buoys as well as a power buoy is located in 16m water depth, and is connected to the shore storage with 2 x 16in lines, with a discharge capacity of up to 1,800 cubic metres per hour(1800m3/hr).
The facility can berth tankers of up to 60,000 Dead Weight Tons (DWT)(80, 460,000lts).
The SPM on the other hand is a single buoy system located in 20m of water depth with capacity to moor full sized tanker vessels of up to 90,000 DWT(120,000,000lts). The mooring is connected to the storage via 2 x 24-inch lines with a discharge capacity of up to 4,200 cubic meters per hour.
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Mbah said the faclity allows the direct discharge of refined products from the mother vessel in an open sea through a subsea pipeline to an onshore terminal that has storage.
“So in terms of most efficient supply facility in the country today, we are number one and there is no other terminal that has an intake facility or what you refer to as receptacle, where you can receive your vessel.
Both moorings are class certified by the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and are adequately equipped with modern functionalities like power, lightings as well as electro-mechanical controls via an umbilical system.
The company also said it comes complete with a Terminal Automation System with real-time control and monitoring of product inventory management, real-time reconciliations, human-machine interface display, loading, and offloading product control, access control, and emergency shutdown systems, among others.
President Buhari is due to commission the first phase of the project on Saturday
Currency, the company has a 300 million Litres of Refined Petroleum Products storage comprising storage for Petrol or Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) as well as Diesel or Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) but the complete project will ultimately increase its storage capacity to about 1 billion litres, with an ultra-modern Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) Terminal to facilitate the import and export of LPG.
In addition, as part of the planned expansion in the medium term, the facility will be expanded to store additional products apart from PMS and AGO such as Jet fuel or Aviation turbine Kerosene (ATK) and other classes of kerosene. The facility also is upscaled to incorporate fuel blending capabilities which will enable the facility to blend and export different specifications of products for other markets in the African West Coast.
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