The National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia (Namcor) has successfully taken charge of the country’s multi-million-dollar National Oil Storage Facility at Walvis Bay. The construction of the facility commenced in January 2015 and was officially handed over to Namcor on March 1, 2021, by the Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Namcor’s Board Chairperson Jennifer Comalie announced Namcor’s official takeover of the facility on March 29. The facility was designed and constructed as a strategic storage facility with the main aim of increasing Namibia’s fuel supply security.
A decision was made to convert it to serve as a commercial storage facility, in addition to the strategic storage imperative, to make sure product is continually used and replenished.
The facility consists of a tanker jetty, multiple product pipelines, and a terminal comprising seven tanks with a combined capacity of 75 million litres. In 2019, Cabinet concluded that Namcor will operate and maintain the facility upon completion after considering several international bidders who were also interested in operating and managing it.
Namcor Managing Director Immanuel Mulunga explained that commissioning the facility meant bringing in fuel equivalent to the capacity of the terminal in order to test the operation of the jetty, pipelines and tanks and its connecting systems.
He pointed out that as per the Operatorship Agreement between the Ministry of Mines and Energy and Namcor, the latter was to supply the commissioning stock and on-sell it to its customer base once commissioning was completed.
The first shipment of commissioning stock arrived on December 1, 2020. The commissioning stock was valued at N$407.3 million and consisted of approximately 37 million litres of Diesel (ADO), 21 million litres of Unleaded Petrol (ULP), and 9 million litres of Low Sulphur Fuel Oil (LSFO) (5 million litres of this went for commissioning while the rest went into our existing HFO tanks).