In the lead-up to its commissioning, slated to take place before the end of this year, the Ras Markaz Crude Oil Storage Terminal of Oman Tank Terminal Company (OTTCO), a subsidiary of OQ Group, is gearing up to receive its maiden cargo of crude oil destined for processing at the nearby Duqm Refinery nearing completion at Duqm Special Economic Zone (SEZ) on Oman’s southeast coast.
Revelations to this effect were made by a top official of OTTCO in a recent interview to S&P Global Commodity Insights, a division of S&P Global, the world's foremost provider of credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and solutions for the global capital and commodity markets.
OTTCO owns and operates what is envisioned to be one of the world’s biggest crude oil storage terminals with a total capacity anticipated to reach around 200 million barrels when fully rolled out over multiple phases based on demand.
The facility, located approximately 70 km south of Duqm Refinery, currently hosts storage capacity of around 5.6 million barrels representing part of the Phase 1 capacity of 26 million barrels.
"We are going to commission Ras Markaz crude facility by the end of this year but the operation itself is dependent or subject to the OQ8 refinery start-up," OTTCO CEO Ard Van Hoof was quoted as telling S&P Global Insights in the interview.
As for the source of the crude, that would be decided by OQ8, the 50:50 joint venture of Oman’s OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International, he noted.
The refinery itself – a 230,000 barrels per day (bpd) capacity project currently in the final stages of construction – is scheduled to start trial operations in the first quarter of 2023. Although designed to process different grades of crude, Duqm Refinery was initially envisaged to receive 65 per cent of its feedstock from Kuwait with the remaining 35 per cent coming from Oman.
Conceived as a world-scale crude oil storage hub, rivalling some of the largest in the region, Ras Markaz Crude Oil Park has been wooing regional and international producers and traders to take advantage of the terminal’s advantageous geographical location far removed from the contentious Hormuz Strait.
Last December, OQ inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Saudi oil producing giant Aramco to explore opportunities for cooperation centring on the potential storage of Saudi crude at Ras Markaz.
More recently, Oman’s Ministry of Energy and Minerals affirmed the government’s commitment to utilising Ras Markaz for the storage of its own Oman Export Blend (OEB) of crude – a move that will also open the way for the establishment of a new export terminal for OEB as an alternative to Mina Al Fahal, the nation’s principal oil export terminal located off Muscat.
Under an agreement signed by the ministry with OQ Group about a week ago, the two sides will work towards developing, building and operating a new pipeline that will be connected with its infrastructure to transfer, store and export Oman Export Blend Crude Oil from the Ras Markaz crude oil terminal.
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