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Rubis has announced that it has completed the project announced last July to purchase a 50 percent shareholding in Delta Petrol, which owns and operates the largest independent oil terminal in the Mediteranean, situated in Ceyhan, Turkey. The new joint venture company is to be renamed Delta Rubis.

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 storage terminal currently has a capacity of 650,000 cubic metres (cbm), contracted to a customer base of international oil operators.

Rubis' plan for the new partnership is to build a 2.4-kilometre (km) jetty and a tank farm, which will expand the depot's total capacity to 1 million cubic metres (cbm). According to Rubis, this will give the company a competitive advantage in capturing expanding logistical demand in the region and positioning the depot as one of the most active in the local area, broadening its range of customers and products stored (crude oil and bunker fuel), and opening it up to the rapidly expanding import market in Turkey.

For Rubis, the deal represents an investment of around USD 160 million when completed. "This investment should start to deliver its full return as soon as the expansion work is commissioned," the company said.

The extension work is planned to start over the next few weeks with completion expected during the first quarter of 2014.

"Having a strong and leading position in France with its network of coastal terminals and its more recent operations in Antwerp and Rotterdam, Rubis Group is enlarging its international base through this promising entry in the Mediterranean, accumulating a capacity of about 3 million cbm of storage in the near future," Rubis added.