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Puma sets up Croatia bitumen barge supply operation

  • Spanish Market: Oil products
  • 24/05/24

Trafigura subsidiary Puma Energy has set up 7,000t of floating bitumen storage at Split, Croatia, to facilitate cargo import flows that will be trucked into domestic and adjacent markets, which is likely to inject a new dynamic into regional bitumen pricing.

Regional market participants said a bitumen barge that will hold the bitumen volumes at Split port and make periodic discharges there directly into waiting road tankers is expected to arrive at the end of May, with the new bitumen operation to begin a month later.

Puma Energy officials have so far not commented on whether the barge to be used in the new operation is being transferred to Split from Newport, Wales, a few months after the firm suspended bitumen barge operations there. Company officials have also yet to comment on the longer term status of that operation from which Welsh and western England markets in particular were served by Trafigura.

The firm had previously stated it operated 10,000t of bitumen storage at Newport, while a company official said this week that Newport capacity had been cut to 3,000t.

A spokesman for Trafigura Group said "we continue to supply high quality bitumen products to our UK-based customers using the best possible logistics solution available".

The firm continues to operate a 20,000t capacity ship-to-tank bitumen import terminal at Dagenham on the Thames in east London, importing bitumen tanker cargoes into the facility for supply into domestic customers.

The switch to operations in Croatia follows a spate of direct tanker-to-truck deliveries into Split by Trafigura beginning in June 2022, delivering around 30,000t in those flows in 2022 and 35,000t in 2023, according to Vortexa data.

But market participants said the logistics were cumbersome, often resulting in delays and sometimes to demurrage costs being incurred. They said this was likely to be the key reason for the switch to the operation that will see bitumen tankers fill up at Split that will in turn made periodic barge-to-truck deliveries according to customer requirements.


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