Fujairah’s location outside the Strait of Hormuz oil-shipment chokepoint gives it an advantage in attracting international oil traders and tank operators to expand in the Emirate, Salem Kelil, technical adviser to the emirate’s government, said at a conference in Dubai yesterday.

Vitol Group and Royal Vopak NV may add crude oil tanks at storage sites in Fujairah where they are partners, he said. The companies, which have stakes in separate fuel storage ventures there, are evaluating plans to add as much as one million cubic metres of crude storage capacity each, Kelil said. Fujairah’s capacity for storing crude oil and refined products is set to rise to 13.3 million cubic metres in 2015, from about 6.8 million cubic metres by the end of this year, Kelil said.

Floating storage

Sinopec will take up about half the 1.1 million cubic metres of oil products storage that Singapore-based Concorde Energy plans to build in Fujairah, Kelil said. That project is due to be completed by the third quarter of 2014, he said.

Gulf Petrochem is set to begin operating storage space from 412,000 cubic metres of new tanks by the end of this year, Shiv Prassad Menon, the company’s Dubai-based operations manager, said in an interview yesterday.

The company may expand the site to a total capacity of 1.2 million cubic metres, he said. It has already leased about 120,000 cubic metres of storage space to local ship fuel providers, he said.

The proposed Fujairah LNG terminal would be built in two phases, each having a capacity of 600 million standard cubic feet per day, Kelil said.

The first phase will include a floating storage and regasification terminal and will be completed in the second quarter of 2014. An onshore import terminal will be built a year later, Kelil said.

LNG is gas that’s chilled to a liquid form for shipment by tankers over distances not served by pipelines. Upon arrival, the LNG is turned back into gas for local distribution.