The facility includes two separate tank farms in Zhenhai District of Ningbo City that together can hold up to 3.8 million cubic metres, or some 24 million barrels of oil, the report on www.cpgd.cn said, sourcing Sinopec’s pipeline and oil storage unit.
One farm, with 12 oil tanks that have 100,000 cubic metres of capacity each, is close to Sinopec’s existing, temporary oil storage facilities. Another farm with 26 tanks neighbours China’s first strategic oil reserve base, Zhenhai, the report said.
It did not say when trial runs would begin or from where oil would be sourced.
Rival PetroChina (0857.HK) has also completed construction of the first phase of a major oil storage facility in northwestern Xinjiang and has begun to fill the tanks with Kazakhstan crude. [nPEK245958]
The oil duopoly set up new subsidiaries last year to manage commercial reserves and have speeded up expanding storage capacity.
Collapsing oil prices have provided a good opportunity for China — the world’s second-largest oil user who relies on overseas markets for half of its supply — to boost its fledgling oil reserves to meet future needs, analysts have said.
The country in November began filling Huangdao, the third of its four state-owned strategic crude oil bases. The four bases, including Aoshan and Dalian, have total storage capacity of 102 million barrels, or about one month’s imports.