The President Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd), will on Saturday, inaugurate the over $1bn products terminal belonging to Pinnacle Oil & Gas Limited.

The terminal with over one billion litre-capacity is located right inside the Lekki Free Trade Zone in Lagos.

Apart from the NNPC, which is the highest market supplier, Pinnacle is a major player in the downstream sub-sector with 23 per cent market share.

Speaking on the feat, the Company’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Peter Mbah, said the facility, which had both offshore intake facilities, sat on a water depth of 23 metres from the shore, with between 80-100 million litres capacity.

“What we are about to unveil on Saturday is an offshore intake facility. There are actually two offshore intake facilities. One sits on a water depth of 23 metres that has two cargo pipelines of 24-inch diameter. We also have the CBM, which sits at a water depth of 17 metres. It has two cargo pipelines of 16 diametres.

“Currently, the way the operations in the downstream work is that you have these large vessels which are unable to go to the port because the water channel is not deep enough for them to berth where the storage terminals are. What typically happens is that those mother vessels sit at the anchorage and wait there where daughter vessels are taken to them. A typical mother vessel has between 80-100 million litres capacity, while a daughter vessel does 15-20 million litres.

“For a mother vessel, the shuttle vessel would need to do a minimum of four voyages, and each takes an average of eight days to do one voyage. What we did was to observe these multiple handlings in operations, and designed facilities that disrupt those sub-optimisation and inefficiencies.