Deal inked with Chinese firm for oil pipeline
Bangladesh government today signed an agreement with China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau to build a mooring point and 220 kilometres of pipeline for imported oil.
Zhao Yujian, president of CPPB, and Sayed Mohammad Mozammel Haque, a director of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation, signed the deal in Dhaka.
The estimated cost of the single mooring point with double pipeline is Tk 5,426 crore. Bangladesh government will provide Tk 1,021 crore and BPC Tk 111 crore. The rest Tk 4,293 crore will come from China Exim Bank as project financing.
The new infrastructure will have annual unloading capacity of 90 lakh tonnes. It will unload 1.20 lakh tonnes of crude oil in 48 hours and 70,000 tonnes of diesel in 28 hours.
Under the project 146-kilometre offshore pipeline and 74km onshore pipeline will be built to bring imported oil from deep sea to Eastern Refinery Ltd (ERL) in Chittagong for processing.
Three tanks for crude oil and another three for diesel will be set up in Moheshkhali Island in the Bay of Bengal. The project is expected to start operation in December 2018.
The single mooring point with double pipeline aims at unloading imported crude and finished petroleum products easily and at reduced costs and time, help expand Bangladesh’s refinery capacity and ensure energy security, according to BPC.
Bangladesh cannot handle large vessels because of low navigability of the Karnaphuli river and constrained facilities at Chittagong port. As a result, large vessels carrying imported crude and finished oil have to anchor in the deep sea, and small vessels are used to unload and bring in the petroleum products to ERL.
As a result, it takes 11 days to unload a 100,000 dead weight tonnage tanker to unload the product.
But once the single point mooring double pipeline is installed, it will bring down the unloading time, said Mahmud Reza Khan, chairman of BPC.
Nasrul Hamid, state minister for power and energy, said the double pipeline will save the country Tk 1,000 crore a year in reduced vessel fare and operational loss. “It will help us import oil fast.”
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