The Petroleum Pipelines Act requires owners of storage facilities to inform Nersa of excess capacity in their facilities. This is made available to third parties, especially emerging petroleum companies.

Access to infrastructure for the movement and storage of petroleum products is critical to emerging companies. Lack of access to these facilities frequently constrains their growth and expansion.

Emerging petroleum companies often do not have funds for investment in infrastructure such as storage facilities, which further raises barriers of entry to the capital-intensive petroleum products sector. For instance, a lack of access to storage facilities hampers emerging companies’ ability to import fuel.

Nersa has published the 72 facilities with uncommitted capacity and these are spread across SA. The regulator said the facilities could be available for rental use by third parties.

“The fact that the energy regulator publishes such information does not guarantee prospective customers that there will always be uncommitted capacity available to third parties at those storage facilities,” it said.

The published facilities belong to, among others, BP, Shell, Engen, Total, Vopak, PetroSA, Transnet, Airports Company SA, the Strategic Fuel Fund Association and Drakensberg Oil. The facilities are for different products including petrol, diesel, crude oil, paraffin and jet fuel.

By law the companies are required to inform Nersa of their spare capacity. They should also publish the process and principles used to allocate spare capacity. This includes information on tariffs, spare capacity determination and access rules and requirements.

This time last year, the number of facilities with spare capacity was 27.