India's Paradip offers single-buoy mooring; eases crude shipping

News was prepared under the information support of Online Daily Newspaper on Hellenic and international Shipping "Hellenic Shipping News".

30 Dec 2008

India's state-owned refiner Indian Oil Corp. has commissioned its new single-buoy mooring facility at Paradip port in the eastern state of Orissa, shipping sources said Tuesday. IOC, which had started the SBM project three years ago, saw the new facility kick off with the MT JL Nehru discharging 66,000 mt of crude on Sunday, the sources said. A single-buoy mooring facility, or SBM, is an offshore buoy which serves as a mooring point for tankers to discharge their liquid cargoes.
The Paradip SBM, which is connected to close to 15 onshore storage tanks and is capable of handling very large crude carriers, will mainly help IOC in cutting crude transportation costs to its Haldia and Barauni refineries.
The new facility will also help decongest Haldia port, which in the last few years has seen in-bound vessels getting bunched up at Sandheads, the mouth of the Hooghly river.
With the Haldia port unable to accommodate VLCCs due to lack of draft, the Paradip SBM will help do away with the time-consuming process of lightering, where crude is transferred from bigger ships to smaller ships on the high seas.

Source: Platts