In the world, there are considered to be four major oil trading hubs: ARA, Singapore, Fujairah. These four port areas have their own different identity and their own local trading dynamics. In this high level research, we will compare investment intensity in these locations. For comparison purposes in ARA, we have split ARA in only Rotterdam and Antwerp.

In these 5 ports combined there are 146 terminal companies active. Most of the companies are situated in Houston (53), followed by Rotterdam (31), Antwerp (24), Singapore (21) and Fujairah (17). Looking at the capacity, these ports sum up to 76.35Mcbm. Most capacity is available in Houston (25Mcbm), followed by Rotterdam (19Mcbm), Singapore (15.28Mcbm), Fujairah (9.35Mcbm) and Antwerp (7.65Mcbm).

When we divided total storage capacity with the number of terminals we can calculate the average capacity per terminal. Biggest average tank size is in Singapore (0.73Mcbm), followed by Rotterdam (0.62Mcbm), Fujairah (0.55Mcbm), Houston (0.47Mcbm) and Antwerp (0.32Mcbm).

This calculation says something about the local storage footprint and the port’s specialty. For instance, Singapore is an Asian bunker hub which facilitates fuel oil storage. There are a number of big underground caverns there. Antwerp is focused on specialty chemical storage which need smaller tank sizes and lower average storage capacity per terminal.

For these five port areas, it is believed that around 22 expansions projects (existing greenfield, brownfield and planned additions) will add almost 8kcbm to current capacity. Fujairah has 7 projects, followed by Houston (6), Antwerp (5), Singapore (3) and Rotterdam. Looking at the growth per capacity, port that shows the largest storage additions is Fujairah (29%), Antwerp (11%), Houston (9%), Rotterdam (7%) and Singapore (5%).

The conclusion of these statistics is that the major oil trading hubs have different strengths, serve a different purpose and show their own investment dynamics. Insights Global has presence at all these ports. We have the statistics and local knowledge to help investment companies value storage assets they would like to include in their investment portfolio.

Jacob van den Berge, M&S manager Insights Global