---

Leading marine fuel supplier Chemoil Energy has said that it expects its storage facility in Fujairah to be completed by 2011, a year later than originally planned, Thomson Reuters reports.

Once completed, the total capacity of its GPS-Chemoil terminal, a joint venture project with Gulf Petroleum Supplies will be approximately 700,000 cubic metres.

“We will start construction in the next month or two, right now we are finding contractors. Hopefully we’ll be operational by mid-2011,” Adrian Tolson, vice-president of sales and marketing for Chemoil told Thomson Reuters.

In March 2008, Chemoil announced plans to further expand the facility to provide additional storage of between 500,000 to 550,000 cubic meters by the third quarter of 2010, using land leased from the port of Fujairah. Once fully operational, it will be the company's largest owned terminal facility.

Approximately 75 percent of the new tank capacity at the terminal would be dedicated to dark fuel which could include some commercial crude storage, with the remaining 25 percent to be utilized for clean petroleum products.

“GPS-Chemoil will operate the facility as a company, Chemoil obviously for its bunkering operation will take a significant percentage of it, but there will be a percentage leased out to a third-party,” Tolson said.

“Given the location I’d imagine there would be some crude oil storage there at certain points...because of the location of the (Abu Dhabi) pipeline.”

Abu Dhabi's government-owned International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) is building an oil pipeline that will bypass the Strait of Hormuz. It is due to start up in March 2010.

“The amount of interest there is for tank storage in this region, and a lot of it is being done for strategic reasons for crude oil storage, I’d have to believe there is going to be a lot of commercial crude trading going on in this area, in the future,” Tolson said.

Given the size of the Fujairah bunker market - estimates currently stand at between 13 and 14 million tonnes - Chemoil believes there is significant opportunity for the company to realize its growth ambitions.

In June 2008, Chemoil took delivery of its third barge, the Heredia Sea, to support growing operations in the port of Fujairah.

Meanwhile, the port of Fujairah also has development plans in place. It is aiming to create four more jetties that will be able to accommodate four 150,000 DWT vessels or three 150,000 DWT and two 15,000 DWT vessels.

Elsewhere, Chemoil last year acquired a controlling interest in an ocean-front storage terminal located in Batangas, Philippines. The facility has an operational capacity of 34,000 cubic meters that can be used for the storage of petroleum products such as fuel oil, gasoline and diesel.

Another facility, the company's flagship Helios Terminal on Jurong Island, Singapore, also commenced operations at the start of last year.

Last month Chemoil announced that its profit after tax for the year ending 31st December rose by US$16.8 million, or 55 percent, from US$30.3 million in 2007 to US$ 47.1 million. The company said a 62 percent increase in annual revenue had been boosted by sales volumes from its new supply operations in the Middle East and Singapore, together with an increase in cargo sales.