Reliance, which has been actively marketing products from the new 580,000 barrels per day (bpd) refinery in Jamnagar on India’s western Gujarat state, already has storage in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, industry sources had said.
The tank capacity in the Singapore oil hub was leased from Dutch oil and chemicals storage operator Royal Vopak NV, industry sources said on Tuesday.
“The Reliance storage is part of the new Vopak capacity that came online these last few weeks,” one industry source told Reuters. Reliance did not respond to Reuters queries on the matter.
Vopak started operating 320,000 cu m of expanded capacity at its Banyan facility in early-November, bringing its total storage capacity for fuel and chemicals in Singapore to more than 2.5 million cu m. A source familiar with storage operations in Singapore said the new Vopak capacity has been fully leased.
The Indian refiner, which also operates an existing 660,000-bpd facility in Jamnagar, traded gas oil for the first time on Monday in the Singapore Platts daily price assessment exercise as Reliance Industries Middle East. It was also in the market on Tuesday, offering a January cargo of 0.5 per cent sulphur gas oil.
The Asian fuel market, already weighed down by slower demand from major consumers including China and Indonesia, may face further pressure when Reliance’s new giant refinery starts commercial exports.
Vietnam, the region’s No 2 buyer of diesel and gasoline, will also fire up its first oil refinery in the first quarter next year, alleviating 30 per cent of domestic fuel needs.
The new Reliance refinery, run as a subsidiary called Reliance Petroleum Ltd and 5 per cent-owned by Chevron Corp, will alone produce enough fuel to meet the 500,000 bpd global demand growth that the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated for 2009.