TALLINN - AS Stivterminal last week said it would launch its new oil products terminal at Muuga Port by the end of the year.
The business paper Delovyie Vedomosti reported that at present the ETP Group has completed drawings for the construction of Stivterminal's terminal, the permit for which was issued last fall, and the company had started looking for a project leader and construction supervisor.
According to documents, the plan is to build two fuel tanks of 25,000 cubic meters each, two rail loading platforms, a compressor station and four pipelines connecting the terminal with the oil wharf. But Antali Lipinksi, member of Stivterminal's supervisory board, said the plans were much more ambitious and included a reservoir park of up to 160,000 cubic meters for both light and dark oil products.
At a transit-related conference earlier this month an Estonian specialist warned that the days of rapid growth in the oil-related part of the sector were over.
"The time of fast growth in the Estonian transit business is over because the flow of oil through Estonia will be decreasing before 2010," said Erik Terk, director of the Estonian Institute for Futures Studies. "Oil will not run out [worldwide], but Russia's domestic consumption and sales to China will grow."
Transneft, Russia's pipeline operator, wants to increase oil and oil product capacity at the Primorsk terminal to 62 million tons this year. Latvia, in the meantime, is intending to bring a strategic investor to its troubled Ventspils port. Together, this all amounts to major traffic in the area.
Andrus Ansip, Estonia's minister of economy, said a tripling of Russian oil exports through the Baltic Sea represents a great challenge for Estonia. "With oil extraction growing fast, Russia intends to triple the shipment of crude and oil products via the Baltic Sea by the year 2010," he said at the Feb. 3 conference.
"Coping with the surging crude and oil shipment in the Gulf of Finland is a challenge for Estonia in the near future," the minister stressed.
Ansip pointed out that in 2003 alone Russia exported via the Gulf of Finland 65 million tons of crude and 45 million tons of oil products. "This would make a seemingly unbelievable 330 million tons a year," he said, speaking of the vision for 2010.
