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Turkey-headquartered oil terminal operator Delta Rubis has commenced work to build the largest jetty in the Mediterranean at its storage facility in Ceyhan, Turkey, according to industry reports.

When completed, the new jetty will have six berths and a maximum draft of up to 19 metres, accommodating vessels up to 200,000 tonnes.

The Ceyhan storage facility is the largest independent oil terminal in the Mediterranean. It currently has a capacity of 650,000 cubic metres (cbm), contracted to a customer base of international oil operators. The expansion project to build a 2.3-kilometre (km) jetty and a tank farm will increase the depot's total capacity to over 1 million cbm.

Located in the south-east region of Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast, Ceyhan lies at the hub of two pipelines: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, bringing crude oil from the Caspian Sea, and the Kirkuk-Ceyhan (KC) pipeline, which brings crude from Kirkuk in Iraq.

This area of the Eastern Mediterranean looks set to become a key logistical hub for the region’s oil products, with inter-Mediterranean flows, exports to Africa and Asia, and proximity to the Suez Canal and the Black Sea.

The jetty construction project is said to have been financed via a US$65 million structured loan facility arranged by BNP Paribas Group.

Sami Habbab, CEO of Delta Rubis, is quoted as saying: "As Turkey gains more importance in the global energy and oil trade, the Ceyhan Region becomes strategically more important. By the agreement signed with BNP Paribas, we aim to complete the jetty in 2015. In accordance with the development of the region, the current facility will support and allow integration with the refineries, petrochemical facilities and the infrastructure of oil pipes in the region. New services besides oil product handling, such as bunkering, LPG, LNG and petrochemicals throughput could also be envisaged as additional activities tied to the building of such a large and multipurpose jetty structure."

Delta Rubis is a joint venture company owned by Turkey's Delta Petrol and French firm Rubis.