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By Chinwendu Obienyi
Group Chief Executive at Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, Mr Peter Mbah, has announced that its newly built $1 billion Lekki Petroleum products terminal infrastructure will be commissioned by President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday, October 22
Briefing newsmen in Lagos on Tuesday, Mbah described the company’s 300million -litre capacity facility situated in the Lekki Free Trade Zone as a game changer in the nation’s oil and gas down stream sector. “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 thus reducing transaction cycle on large liquid cargo vessels from 32 to just two days.
This according to him , will in effect improve the efficiency of the Nigerian downstream industry by eliminating the need for expensive vessel lightering, reducing the accumulation of demurrage for visiting mother vessels, reducing the typical out turn losses that typically occur during lightering operations etc.
He said “All of these have resulted in significant savings for vessels berthing at the terminal as opposed to berthing at any of the other mooring facilities in the Lagos area”.
Mbah revealed that the facility currently has capacity for 300 million litres of refined petroleum products storage for storage of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) Automotive Gas Oil (AGO), Conventional Buoy Mooring (CBM) Facility (An offshore Mooring System) with 2 Nos. 16inch 8km of subsea products pipeline network with a combined discharge flowrate of 1800m3/hr, Single Point Mooring (SPM) facility with 2Nos. 24inch 10km of subsea products pipeline network with combined discharge flowrate of 4,000m3/hr, Pumps/loading gantries systems with ability to truck out 20millionlts/day.
“What we are about to unveil on Saturday are two offshore intake facilities, including one SPM that sits at the water depth of 23 meters with two cargo pipelines of 24 inch diameter, and one CBM which is a conventional marine system that sits at a water depth of 17 meters with two cargo pipelines of 16 diameters”, he said. He said, “We conceived this idea in 2011. That was when we got the concession to do this, and then we had to obtain over 24 regulatory approvals, including approvals from the Federal Executive Council, because it is beyond a ministerial approval for a project of this size”.
According to him, the newly built infrastructure was created following the inefficiencies in the operating space and to save cost and time.
“The SPM and CBM allows you to take the mother vessel in an open sea where you have enough depth for the mother vessel and discharge from that point to an onshore terminal that has storage. So the pipeline that I have described the 24 inch diameter pipeline and the 16 inch diameter pipeline are subsea and we have what is referred to as pipeline end manifold.
So what we have done is to provide an efficient discharge facility. Those typical voyages you do that takes you 8 days and 4 times to empty an 80 million litres of product now takes you two days to do so. What that means is our turnaround time is faster and we are able to do more volume than our competitors, that has put us in the leadership of the industry”, Mbah explained.
He also revealed that the new infrastructure have the ability beyond the storage capacity to load more than 20 million litres of products daily and added that it can import and export products.
According to him, the funds gotten from cost of the new infrastructure which is about $1 billion, was obtained from a consortium of Nigerian banks.
“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.
This project, which required investments of over $1 billion is the initial phase of the complete project which will ultimately increase to about 1 billion litres in storage capacity, with an ultra-modern Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) Terminal to facilitate 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 be upscaled to incorporate fuel blending capabilities which will enable the facility blend and export different specifications of products for other markets in the African West Coast”, Mbah said.
Also speaking at the briefing, the Managing Director, Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, Bob Dickerman, stated that in addition to being the newest terminal in Africa, the company have created the most automated terminal in West Africa.
“At a time the country is losing about N5 billion daily due to the gridlock in Apapa, this new infrastructure located at the Lekki free trade zone axis will help in the movement of dry cargoes which would ordinarily wait for days if not months, before they come into our ports, freight costs will reduce and the earning of revenue of the government – both Customs and the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) will be enhanced”, Dickerman said.
