The Pengerang terminal, majority owned by the joint venture between Dialog and Vopak, started operations last year.
PETALING JAYA: The Pengerang oil terminal in Johor is expected to receive greater interest following its inclusion into oil agency Platts Singapore’s pricing assessments for middle distillates and gasoline.
Industry players said the inclusion of the Pengerang oil terminal was expected to offer traders more flexibility in loading cargo and improve market liquidity.
“This will help efforts to make Johor the region’s oil and gas trading hub by providing traders accurate and timely information on the prices of oil products,” an analyst said.
The Pengerang terminal, majority owned by the 51%-49% joint venture between Dialog Group Bhd
and Dutch oil and chemicals storage company Vopak, started operations last year.
“The accreditation (by Platts) will help us in marketing our terminal. We can market to those traders on Platts.
“The timing is right as we are a new terminal starting out. This will be encouraging for us,” Law Say Huat, chief executive officer of the venture developing the Pengerang terminal said when contacted.
He added that it had just commissioned phase 1C early this month.
Meanwhile, Reuters quoted a source from Vopak who said that the facility was in the process of being filled but it has not yet reached full capacity.
“With the Platts approval, we expect interest to pick up,” Reuters quoted the source as saying.
In a statement, Platts said: “Following feedback to its proposal to reflect deliveries from the Pengerang terminal in its benchmark free-on-board Singapore assessments for middle distillates and gasoline, Platts confirms that it will include the terminal in its market on close assessment process with effect from May 1, 2015.”
Platts is a leading provider of global energy, petrochemicals and metal information and a premier source of benchmark price assessments for commodity markets.
Apart from landed storage tanks in Singapore, Platts currently recognised loadings from Pasir Gudang, Tanjung Langsat, Tanjung Bin and certain floating storage units in nearby waters for its Singapore price assessment process.
Platts said Pengerang joined those as an alternative delivery location, and would be subject to the same performance requirements and normalisation processes.
The terminal has five berths, with the largest able to accommodate a VLCC (very large crude carrier).
The new terminal has an initial storage capacity of 1.3 million cu m over 50 tanks, though a second stage could add an additional one million cu m.
