Benefits of Single Point Mooring still couple of weeks away

After the formal inauguration by the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the country's first Single Point Mooring (SPM) is going to be commercially commissioned at the end of the current month of November.

The PM inaugurated the SPM on November 11 along with some other projects including the first unit of 1200 MW Matarbari coal-fired power plant.

"We're hopeful of commissioning the project in the last year of November and the tentative date is November 24," said a deputy general manager of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC).

He said initially the SPM will be operated by its Chinese contractor and later a private operator will be hired for its full-fledged operation.

The China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Co Ltd is currently building the country's maiden SPM system as its contractor.

The state-owned BPC set up the SPM to facilitate the offloading of petroleum fuel directly from vessels and transport it through pipeline to the fuel tanker in the land.

According to officials, the offloading of fuel oil from mother vessels through SPM will save at least Tk 800 crore per annum.

This SPM will make the country's energy management system more economical, sustainable and environment friendly, they said.

SPM Project Director Monjed Ali Shanto informed that it will take only 48 hours to transfer the imported petroleum from the mother vessel to storage tanks.

Currently, it takes 11 to 12 days by following offloading through lighterage ships, which is very time-consuming, expensive, and risky.

No lighterage would be required to carry fuel from the mother vessel, which is now moored at the outer quay, after the implementation of the project, he said.

The SPM was built on over 90 acres of land under a G2G project of Bangladesh and China at a cost of Tk 8341 crore at Maheshkhali Upazila in Cox's Bazar.

Officials said that there are three tanks having a storage capacity of 1.80 lakh kilolitre crude oils and three tanks with 1.08 lakh kilolitre furnished oil.

A 15-kilometre-long pipeline has already been installed from land up to deep sea to directly unload imported petroleum oil to the SPM, which has the capacity of unloading 9 million tonnes every year.

A 120-kilometre pipeline was also built from the SPM project to Eastern Refinery Limited (EFL) to treat the crude oil.

The SPM also has a storage capacity of 45,000 tonnes of crude oil.

As part of the project work, approximately 135 kilometres (km) of offshore pipeline and 58 km of onshore pipeline have already been installed.

As part of the project, some six storage tanks were built of which three tanks will be able to store crude oil with 60,000 kilolitre capacity each and the rest be able to store diesel with 36,000 kilolitres each.

The Netherlands-based Blue Water completed the construction of SPM 'Boya' which is awaiting shipment to the project site.

The BPC currently pays $5.50 per tonne to lighterage or small vessels, owned mainly by the Bangladesh Shipping Corporation, to ferry petroleum to its onshore tanks from larger mother vessels. The SPM will save the cost of the BPC.

Bangladesh annually imports around 6 million tonnes of crude and refined oil. Of that, 1.3 million tonnes are crude oil and refined petroleum products the remaining.

According to the officials, a 36-inch-wide pipeline from the mooring point carries the crude oil to the tank at Kalamarchara in Matarbari.

Later, the oil is taken to the Eastern Refinery in Patenga, Chittagong, 220 kilometres away, through an 18-inch wide pipe.

The 110km pipeline was built between a deep-sea mooring point and the Eastern Refinery Ltd in Patenga.