Tenders for construction of 'megafloat' may be called by year-end, say sources
Ronnie Lim Business Times 19 Apr 11;
(SINGAPORE) Singapore is set to embark on the construction of another alternative oil storage facility on very large floating structures (VLFS) at Pulau Sebarok this year-end, sources have told The Business Times.
This comes as almost one-third of the $850 million first phase of the Jurong Rock Cavern (JRC) underground oil storage is completed to-date.
Tenders for construction of the new VLFS, dubbed 'megafloat', are expected to be called at the end of the year, with South Korean and Japanese engineering contractors said to be very keen on the project.
This will follow the expected completion of the VLFS' front-end design around September-October by the appointed consultants, the Jurong Consultants/British Maritime Technology Group consortium, sources said. The consultants are also expected to decide on whether steel or concrete, or a combination of both, will be used for the VLFS construction.
Potential users for the VLFS are in the meantime being sussed out, a JTC spokesperson told BT yesterday, without specifying who they are.
Giving an update of the first phase JRC - building of which started in end-2009 - JTC said that 30 per cent of the underground project has been completed so far, and it is 'currently studying the possibility' of embarking on a second phase of the project.
Having already secured Jurong Aromatics Corporation (JAC) as its first customer for the JRC, the JTC spokesperson said yesterday that it will call tenders by Q3 this year for an operator to run the underground oil storage complex.
The operatorship of the JRC had drawn earlier interest from parties like Vopak and Emirates National Oil Company which currently operate above-ground storage terminals here, with the tender for this expected to be awarded by mid-2012.
The JAC consortium will meanwhile start building its $2 billion aromatics complex next month, after having just closed its project financing last week. Its project on Jurong Island is scheduled to start up in 2014, shortly after completion of JRC's first caverns.
Phase 1 of JRC involves five caverns with a total storage capacity of 1.47 million cubic metres, with plans for phase 2 covering six caverns adding another 1.32 million cu m.
The 'megafloat' project, the first of which will be anchored at Pulau Sebarok, will have a minimum storage capacity of 300,000 cu m, or equal to that of a very large crude carrier. It would comprise two rectangular modules, each with 150,000 cu m of storage capacity.
