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The Bahamas Oil Refining Company (BORCO) is planning to upgrade its oil storage facility, which will include 7.5 million barrels of additional storage and a renovation project to increase the number of berths.

In total it is estimated that the expansion project will cost between US$200 million and US$400 million to upgrade the Grand Bahama-based storage terminal.

Last month Buckeye Partners, L.P. took its sharehoding in BORCO to 100 percent after acquiring Vopak's 20 percent share in LFR Borco Coop Holdings, L.P., the indirect owner of BORCO, for US$340 million. In January Buckeye had purchased an 80 percent share in BORCO from First Reserve Corporation for $1.36 billion.

Commenting on the planned investment project, Elycia Gauthier, investor relations representative at Buckeye said the development was in the engineering phase.

"We will be putting in a flexible storage capacity that can hold crude, fuel and clean petrol products in the same facility, so we are installing different heating elements," she said. "It will be a very large project."

The investment will include the construction of up to 7.5 million barrels of flexible petroleum product storage, increasing the current storage to more than 29 million barrels.

According to Buckeye, future expansion would also be feasible as there is a large amount of unused land on the site, such as the installation of 13 million barrels of incremental storage.

At present there are three deepwater jetties on the site which range from 13-30 metres in size, but the renovation project is set to leave the site with eight berths which will be used as access points to the storage facilities. These berths will be able to handle 20,000dwt to 500,000dwt, including both VLCCs and ULCCs.