Trial run of Single Point Mooring's crude oil part on 25 June

A part of the much-anticipated Single Point Mooring (SPM) – a pipeline facility to pump imported petroleum products from the deep sea to the storage and refinery – will be commissioned on June 25 on a trial basis through the first filling of a crude oil shipment.

The high officials of the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation and the Eastern Refinery Limited will commission the crude oil handling part of the project by unloading 82,000 tonnes of crude oil from the mother vessel.

And Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will formally inaugurate the project next month, Project Director Engineer Sharif Hasnat told The Business Standard.

Preparatory work for the trial run has already been completed, said Engineer Sharif Hasnat.

The state-owned corporation, which is responsible for importing liquid fuel and supplying energy across the country through its distribution units, imports around 63 lakh tonnes of fuel in refined and crude forms.

At present, it takes 10-11 days to release one lakh tonnes of oil from the deep sea through small lighterage vessels.

In order to save both time and money in unloading crude and refined petroleum products, the government took up a project in 2015 at a cost of Tk4,935 crore with a deadline of December 2018.

It is expected that the SPM pipeline will take only two to three days to discharge the oil. Then there will be no need to operate lighterage vessels, which will save transportation costs.

The project is anticipated to result in savings of approximately Tk800 crore annually in freight costs.

But with multiple time extensions and missed deadlines, the project has already seen a cost escalation of 44.37% to Tk7,125 crore. And another 15.39% cost escalation has been tabled and is now under consideration.

How oil will reach Chattogram from the deep sea

The SPM with double pipeline is an off-shore and on-shore project at a time. Under the project, a 74-kilometer-long off-shore pipeline has been installed from Kutubdia in the deep sea to Anowara at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal.

A 36-kilometer-long on-shore pipeline has been installed from Anowara to the Eastern Refinery Ltd premises at Patenga.

Besides, a storage facility with six storage tanks and other infrastructure has been built on a 90-acre area of land.

Of the six tanks, three will be able to store crude oil with a capacity of 35,000 cubic meters each, and the rest have the capacity to store 60,000 cubic metres of refined oil each, said project officials.

Md Lokman, managing director of Eastern Refinery Limited, the state-owned lone refinery in the country, earlier told TBS that oil tankers will dock at the single point mooring buoy located on the western side of Moheshkhali Island.

The crude oil and finished products will be pumped from the vessels directly through the single point mooring buoy and stored in six storage tanks at Moheshkhali, using two separate pipelines.

Subsequently, the oil will be pumped from Moheshkhali to the Eastern Refinery in Chattogram for processing.