Oil firm completes $1bn petroleum products terminal off Lagos coast

Pinnacle Oil and Gas Ltd, a leading downstream firm has completed a petroleum products terminal in Lekki, off the coast of Lagos.

According to the CEO of the company, Mr Peter Mbah, the newly completed petroleum products terminal, which is the largest in the country, would allow intake and offtake of refined petroleum products from large/mother vessels through an undersea pipeline to its terminal in Lekki.

Briefing journalists in Lagos, Mbah disclosed that President Mohammadu Buhari will be inaugurating the largest petroleum terminal facility this Saturday in Lekki, Lagos.

The CEO said the new facility, which was conceived in 2011, gulped over $ 1 billion worth of investments from a consortium of local and international lenders.

Besides, he said the construction passed through multiple approvals up to the Federal Executive Council and earned the company a local content award for the liberal use of local skill.

With the new facility, he stated that the restriction/ delay associated with the discharge of large vessels at the port has been drastically reduced to less than 48 hours instead 32 days.

Mbah explained that the Single Point Mooring (SPM) and Conventional Buoy Mooring (CBM) facility will allow large or mother vessels in an open sea where there is enough depth for them to discharge from the point to an onshore terminal that has storage.

“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 CEO said.

It would take a small vessel with a 20m litre 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.

Pinnacle oil and gas is a company that plays in the downstream oil sector

The company pride itself as the leader in the sector in terms of infrastructure already built and market share, which is 23 per cent.

The CEO explained that the company has been able to observe the multiple handlings in the operating space and designed facilities that disrupt those sub-optimisation and the inefficiency.

“What we are about to unveil on Saturday is an offshore intake facility. There are two offshore intake facilities. One is an SPM that sits at a water depth of 23 metres that has two cargo pipelines in 24-inch diameter. And then, we have the Conventional Buoy Mooring system that sits at a water depth of 17metres and has two cargo pipelines of 16 diameters.

“The way the operation works in the downstream, you have large vessels, those large vessels would not be able to go to the port because of the drought restrictions, because the water channel is not deep enough for the big vessel to go to our port, where you have a storage terminal.

“So what happens is that those big vessels or mother vessels sit at the anchorage, waited and we go with the smaller or daughter vessels.

“So a typical mother vessel we have about 80 to 120 million litres and typical shuttle vessels will do a trip of between 15 and 20 million litres.

“So for a modern vessel of 80million, the shuttle vessel will need to do a minimum of eight and for each voyage, it takes an average of four days to move from the Port, go to the mother vessel, load 20 million litres and go back to the terminal and discharge. That operation takes eight days to do,” the CEO 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 networks. 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 networks with a combined discharge flow rate of 4,000m3/hr.

The CBM which includes 4 individual buoys as well as a power buoy is located at 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 the 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.

Currently, the company has 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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