Crude and petroleum product capacity at the port is set to grow 75% by 2020, a local Fujairah news report said.

The port’s tank storage capacity is expected to reach about 8 mill cu m by the end of this year and is forecast to rise to 14 mill cu m by 2020, according to UAE officials.

This expansion will “increase trade flows and cement the UAE as a major oil storage hub,” reportedly said Ali Al Yabhouni, the UAE OPEC governor at the recent Fujairah Bunkering and Fuel Oil Forum.

In addition to the storage expansion, there are also plans to build a refinery capable of handling 200,000 barrels per day, plus LNG re-gasification facilities.

Fujairah Oil Terminals, a joint venture between Singapore-based Concord Energy, a subsidiary of China’s Sinopec and the Fujairah government, this month opened tank storage facilities with a capacity of 1.17 mill cu m.

Vopak Horizon Fujairah will add 480,000 cu m to Vopak’s current 2.1 mill cu m capacity by the summer of next year.

And Vitol Tank Terminals International Fujairah (VTTI), a joint venture between the oil trader Vitol and the Malaysian shipping company MISC, is planning to add 430,000 cu m in the second quarter of next year, which will increase its capacity to 1.7 mill cu m.

In addition, GPS Chemoil, a joint venture between the Singapore-listed marine fuel supplier and trader Chemoil Energy and Gulf Petroleum Supplies, may add 200,000 to 300,000 cu m to its existing 700,000 cu m capacity.

“Fujairah’s location has a huge impact there. You can see up to 2020-25 the demand is shifting toward the Far East and Southeast (Asia), and all the cargo will move towards that side,” reportedly said Dhananjoy Mishra, terminal manager of GPS Chemoil.

“We have a limit on land. The priority for this land will be given to crude oil storage because crude oil produces more throughput, which helps the port recover investments,” said Salem Khalil, a technical adviser to the Government of Fujairah. To cater for crude, the port is building a jetty for VLCCs.

Elsewhere, in Europe, the Port of Rotterdam and independent storage company LBC Tank Terminals have reached a long term agreement for the construction of a new jetty at the LBC terminal at Botlek.

The new jetty will have four berths, two for seagoing vessels of a maximum draft of up to 13 m and two for barges. This will quadruple the jetty capacity of the terminal.

It will be built in two phases. The first phase, comprising the construction of two berths, will be ready by mid-2016, while the entire jetty complex will be completed by the beginning of 2017.

Upon its completion, LBC will be able to handle two parcel tankers of up to 40.000 dwt simultaneously.

In the US, pipeline company NuStar Energy is building storage at its South Texas operations to enable exports of lightly processed condensate out of Corpus Christi, Texas.

The tanks are expected to be finished in June or July this year.

NuStar’s efforts are among the latest to facilitate condensate exports after the US Department of Commerce, issued several approvals in late 2013 to export condensate, as long as it had undergone enough minimal processing to qualify as an exportable refined product.

The company does not have US approval to export condensate and the company is not seeking it, a spokesman said.

While other pipeline companies that have such approvals take ownership of export-bound condensate, NuStar aims to provide the segregation and export infrastructure but will leave the approvals up to oil producers who ship the output, it said.

Last year, NuStar added a third dock at its Corpus Christi complex, doubling loading capacity to 400,000 barrels mainly for LR1s, south of the Eagle Ford.