Singapore: Indonesian oil trading firm PT. Bumi Asri Prima Pratama (BAPP) has started developing a bunkering facility at the port of Batam, local media reported. The move was made in collaboration with the Batam Port Authority.
''All this time, foreign and national ships docking at Batam port have been buying fuel from Singapore since the bunker and ship-to-ship transfer facilities in Batam are still limited,'' Atoek Koesmoeryantati, president director of BAPP, was quoted saying.
Koesmoeryantati said Batam's location in the Malacca Strait is highly strategic to capture bunkering business that has mostly been absorbed by Singapore.
He hoped the new facility would mean that ships docking in Batam no longer need to buy bunkers from Singapore.
Director of BAPP, Theo Satria Chairuman, said the company will also be building two units of oil storage terminals each with 35,000 tonnes capacity.
''One unit to store high speed diesel (HSD) and another unit to store marine fuel oil (MFO),'' he was reported saying.
Just last month construction officially began on the Asia Petroleum Hub (APH), an offshore oil storage and bunkering facility on Tanjung Bin, a 100-acre reclaimed island in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, just off the Port of Tanjung Pelepas.
APH aims to have the RM1.4bn ($413m) project, with a total storage capacity of one million cubic metres, fully operational by mid-2009.The terminal is expected to handle over 30m metric tonnes (mt) of petroleum products a year. APH, like PTP, is seen as a challenge to neighbouring Singapore, the world's largest bunkering hub. [14/08/07]
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