The Tk 8,300 crore Single Point Mooring (SPM) with double pipeline project is failing to utilise its full capacity due to non-expansion of the country's refinery capacity.

According to official sources, the newly installed SPM can now hardly utilise 60 percent of its capacity while around 40 percent remains unutilised.

The SPM project took about nine years to implement and now the project has been operational recently through execution of a test-run. But formally the project will be completed in June this year, said an official of the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC).

Officials informed that after recent commissioning of the SPM project, now it takes only 48 hours to transfer the imported petroleum from the mother vessel to storage tanks.

Before setting up the SMP, it took 11 to 12 days to bring  the imported fuel to the oil tanker of Eastern Refinery Limited  at Petenga area through lighterage ships, which is very time-consuming, expensive, and risky.

Currently, no lighterage is required to carry fuel from the mother vessel, which is now moored at the outer quay, after the implementation of the project, said the officials.

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The SPM was built on over 90 acres of land under a G2G project of Bangladesh and China at a cost of Tk 8341 crore at Maheshkhali Upazila in Cox's Bazar.

Officials said that there are three tanks having a storage capacity of 1.80 lakh kilolitre crude oils and three tanks with 1.08 lakh kilolitre furnished oil.

Project director of the SPM Sharif Hasanat admitted that the project's 30-40 percent capacity remained unutilised because of the limitations in refining more crude oils.

He informed that Bangladesh annually imports about 4.5 million metric tons of refined oils and another 1.5 million metric tons of crude oil from abroad.

"Through handling the imported oils, the SPM project now utilises 60 percent of its capacity," he said, adding, if more crude oils are imported SPM can be used for transportation purpose.      

Officials said the government has undertaken a project to expand the capacity of the country's only refinery --the Eastern Refinery at Patenga with the title ERL-2 to increase the existing capacity by 3 million metric tons.

But that project has not been implemented in the last 14 years since the project was conceived by the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC).    

According to official sources, BPC was considering a technical offer of Technip, a French engineering company, which was engaged through an unsolicited process for creating Front End Engineering Design (FEED) involving Tk 371.81 crore for the proposed ERL unit-2 through a contract signed in January, 2017.

But Technip has left and a local company is trying to persuade the government to implement the ERL-2 project through public-private partnership (PPP) although that private company has no experience in implementing such a project, said a top official of the BPC.

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The Unit-2 project was taken by BPC in 2010 to enhance the company’s capacity to 4.5 million metric tons by adding 3 million metric tons from the new one.

The Unit-1 of the ERL, was installed in 1968 by the same French company, has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million metric tons.

Recently, an Indian firm claimed that it will be involved in the project to implement it at a cost of US 1.7 billion dollars over a period of next three years.

Officials said when BPC conceived the idea of ERL Unit-2 in 2010, the project cost was estimated at Tk 13,000 crore. Then, the project’s cost was raised to Tk16,739 crore in a revised proposal.

But now, the cost may cross Tk 18,000 crore, he said adding that BPC has sent a new development project proforma (DPP) to the Planning Commission through the Energy and Mineral Resources Division (EMRD) seeking another revision to the cost.

The country consumes about 6-6.5 million metric tons (MTS) of petroleum of which 4.8-5 million MTS is imported as refined one while the remaining 1.2-15 million MTS as crude oil to refine those at ERL.

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