Petrotrin Undertakes Infrastructure Upgrades Following Point-a-Pierre Bunker Spill

by Ship & Bunker News Team
Friday May 12, 2017

State-owned Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited (Petrotrin) has initiated a five-year strategic plan focused on restoring its business, including approximately $16 billion over the next four years to upgrade the company's infrastructure, local media reports.

The announcement comes in response to a 20,000 gallon bunker fuel spill in April, which is said to have been caused by a ruptured storage tank at Petrotin's Point-a-Pierre refinery.

"I can’t give the cost for the recent incident. We are doing investigations to collate that. It is a challenge we face with improving the asset integrity at Petrotrin," said Fitzroy Harewood, President of Petrotrin, of expected costs related to spill clean up.

Harewood said Petrotrin intends to implement an asset integrity programme across the company's entire operations - an initiative that could cost Petrotrin billions of dollars.

Two of seven of Petrotrin's tanks that have been deemed high risk are said to be currently under repair.

The company is also said to be investigating the cause of April's tank rupture as the company is reported to have commissioned the tank's repair last year.

"We have an investigation going on. I already said we commissioned a contract last year after we identified seven tanks that needed to be cleaned and fully inspected," said Harewood.

"This is different from external inspections and routine inspections. That tank was part of the seven we are doing."

As Ship & Bunker reported, despite response efforts at the time of April's bunker spill, some of the pollution escaped the primary containment and entered the sea, stretching into Venezuelan waters.