The construction of the multi-billion-dollar National Oil Storage Facility (NOSF) commenced in January 2015 under the Ministry of Mines and Energy and consists of a tanker jetty, multiple product pipelines and a terminal with a capacity of 75 million litres of combined petroleum products.
NAMCOR was appointed by the Government of the Republic of Namibia to manage and operate the new state-of-the-art National Oil Storage Facility (NOSF) in Walvis Bay.
Commissioning of the National Oil Storage Facility (NOSF) commenced in December 2020 and was completed in February 2021. The commissioning stock consisted of approximately 37 million litres of Diesel, 21 million litres of ULP, and five million litres of Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil (VLSFO).
The National Oil Storage Facility consists of a newly built tanker Jetty with 2 berths and with a maximum draft of 16.5m. The Jetty can accommodate vessels with up to 60,000DWT on berth 100 and 90,000 DWT on berth 101 and a maximum LOA of 250m. There are 4 dedicated pipelines for Diesel, ULP, JET, and HFO which cover a total distance of 7.8km from the Jetty up to the Terminal tank farm. The newly constructed Jetty allows vessels to offload more than 1 product and 2 vessels simultaneously to the shore tanks, or to backload products for export onto the vessels.
The bulk fuel storage facility in Walvis Bay has a capacity of 75 million litres of fuel in total, there are 7 storage tanks in total which consist of:
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- Diesel 1x 5,000m³ tank and 2x 20,000m³
- ULP consists of 2x 10,000m³ tanks while
- JET-A1 and HFO have 5000m³ each
Terminal operations include loading and offloading of trucks and rail tankers, intertank transfers, and transfers to and from other oil companies.
The Road loading consists of 3 bays and 14 rail tanker stations. Both the Jetty and the terminal have control rooms for monitoring and controlling product movements, Fire Fighting, and the Terminal Management System.
NOSF has a Nitrogen plant mainly to be used for purging the pipelines after vessel discharge or after backloading the product to the new Jetty.
Both the Terminal and the Jetty are equipped with a well-capacitated firefighting system including a 6 million litre Water Tank, the two mini laboratories at the Jetty and the Tank Farm are fully operational and both laboratories are operated and managed by NAMCOR Laboratory Technicians.
The facility is equipped with a Terminal Management and Control System in line with petroleum industry best practices to ensure the longevity of the terminal a maintenance program was developed and is executed with weekly preventative maintenance as per the scheduled plan.
Through the National Oil Storage Facility, the Government of Namibia enabled the employment of 42 Namibians of which 36% are female. Additional NAMCOR developed an internship program that intends to upgrade local skills in instrumentation and laboratory.
The successful completion and operations of the NOSF enabled the Namibian government to ensure Namibia’s security of fuel supply and provide it with the ability to repay the loan. The primary aim of increasing Namibia’s security of fuel supply from the previous 7-10 days to 30-45 days in situations where the country will be unable to import petroleum products from the international market was thus successfully achieved.