Puerto Moin is on the west side of Limon, the main city on Costa Rica’s Caribbean shore. It was built to serve the 25,000-b/d Moin Refinery that originally gave Recope its name: Refinadora Costarricense de Petroleo.

However, in common with all countries in the Central American-Caribbean (CAC) region, the tea-kettle refineries built 50-60 years ago long since stopped providing the full fuel supply needs of growing countries.

The last year they were making a serious effort to operate the refinery, 2007, Recope was importing 14,300 b/d (14.3 kbd) of crude for the refinery and 36.1 kbd of refined products to meet national fuel needs. In 2011 the refinery shut down, and subsequent plans for a huge refinery upgrade to 65,000 b/d in concert with the Chinese appear to have been scrapped.

Recope remains absolutely in charge of the nation’s fuel supply, but its role has changed to that of importer, terminal and pipeline operator, and manager of fuel distribution.

For LPG, the sole import terminal and storage facility at Moin has been listed for years at 6,000 metric tons (6 KT) or 72,000 bbl (72 kbl) in LPG terminal lists. The project now underway, Sistema de Almacenamiento de Gas Licuado de Petroleo (SAGAS), proposes to add four new spheres of 4,000 cbm, or 25 kbl, and scrap one of the existing 24 kbl spheres.

The financing package amounts to $19 million from a banking syndicate led by BNP Paribas and Societe Generale. In announcing the package, Recope President Sara Salazar stated that SAGAS was one of the most ambitious growth projects undertaken by Recope in many years.

Accompanying this week’s announcement was a chart showing national LPG consumption shooting up 20% from 2010 to 2014. Prying the numbers out of the data bank in Recope’s website, OPIS finds annual LPG consumption climbing from 1,230 kbl in 2009 to 1,365 kbl in 2011, 1,486 kbl in 2013, and 1.6 million bbl in 2014. Since 2009, the 5-year CAGR is 5.35%; since 2004, the 10-year CAGR is 3.92%, and last year’s jump was 7.4%.

With growth like this, it was clear they had to do something at Puerto Moin. In 2004, when annual consumption was 1,087 kbl, the daily average was 2,970 b/d. With 72kbl capacity at the Moin terminal, they had 24.2 days’ supply in storage. In 2010, with consumption up to 3,646 b/d, storage was down to 20 days’ supply. After the 2014 surge to 4,372 b/d, storage could hold only 16.5 days’ supply.

In this week’s announcement, Recope says the first of the four new spheres just went into service, along with a set of six 66,000-gal horizontal cylinders (called “salchichas,” or sausages, in Latin America). So that would be 25 kbl additional capacity in the sphere and 9 kbl in the salchichas, for a total increment of 34 kbl. Thus, at this point, they have boosted capacity to 106 kbl, which gives them 24.2 days’ supply.

Salazar says the plan is to complete the SAGAS project at end-2016. On the way to that point, they will retire their oldest sphere, so total capacity at the finished facility should be close to 150 kbl. At the 2014 rate of consumption, that would give them 34 days’ supply.

At 150 kbl capacity, the Moin terminal will move up from around rank 40 in OPIS’s informal Latin American LPG terminal list to around no.25. That would put it right next to the newly-expanded Tropigas La Union Terminal in El Salvador, which was written up in OPIS on April 26, 2013.

The beauty of expanding to this level is that the import terminal is then capable of a step-up to the next higher range of ship sizes, in this case, the Handy-size vessels. The 2014 consumption rate works out to 133 kbl per month, or roughly 11,000 tons per month. That is the approximate carrying capacity of the Handy-size fleet of 20,700 cbm vessels.

In other words, Costa Rica’s current LPG consumption can be covered by one handy-size cargo per month. When the Moin terminal expansion is complete, they will be able to offload a full handy-size cargo directly to the tanks while continuing to push out 4.7-5.0 kb/d to the national market. As consumption continues to rise, they can just step up the frequency of the handy-size deliveries.