January 18, 2016 [OPIS] - Almost three years ago, OPIS ran an article (April 26, 2013) on a major expansion of the LPG terminal belonging to Grupo Tropigas El Salvador (Tropigas SV). Located at the eastern tip of the country in La Union, the terminal is strategically located to support Tropigas SV's business in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
The existing terminal at the site, Terminales de Gas del Pacifico, consisted of 25 100,000-gallon (100 Kgal) “salchichas” (or “sausages”) with aggregate capacity of 5,000 metric tons (5 KT) and five small 7,500 bbl spheres with aggregate capacity of 37,500 bbl or 3 KT. Terminal capacity was roughly 8 KT.
At that time, the plan was to build five 25 Kbbl spheres (2 KT each), raising terminal capacity to 18 KT which would be enough to receive 20 Kcbm Handysize vessels carrying cargoes of 12 KT. Way back then, Tropigas threw an open house for the LPG supply and trading community to come and see the tanks going up and prepare for a new volume of business.
The project stretched out considerably longer than they thought, but now the terminal expansion is complete, and substantially larger than the original plan. They ended up building eight new 25-Kbbl tanks instead of five, giving them an increment of 16 KT and raising total terminal capacity to 24 KT.
Their first trial run with a larger cargo was a Handysize delivery in November of roughly 10 KT. The ship arrived at the dock at about the time the director general of Tropigas SV, Marco Martinez, was delivering a presentation at the IHS Latin America LPG Seminar Nov. 10 in Bogota.
Now Tropigas is preparing for the full-scale inauguration of the new terminal. The 20,000-ton Gaschem Hamburg, in the Medium Gas Carrier (MGC) class, is presently loading at Oxy NGL’s new Ingleside LPG Terminal across the bay from Corpus Christi. As shown in the IHS presentation, the trip from the Texas coast, through the Panama Canal and around to La Union takes seven days. If all goes according to plan, the ship is scheduled for arrival in La Union Jan. 28.
The terminal sits a half mile back of the dock, formally named the Puerto Corsain (Corporacion Salvadorena de Inversiones). Martinez says it’s a small dock with only 300 meters of wharf. But it’s been in service since the 1970s, and it has served Tropigas well since they built the first part of their terminal in 1996-1997. The terminal has a pipeline connecting it to the wharf, and this may have been upgraded to receive the higher volumes and lower-temperature cargoes from the bigger ships.
In all the previous years, there has never been a question about ship draft coming into Puerto Corsain since they were only receiving pressurized vessels of 3-5 KT. Now with an incoming MGC, they’ll be nearing the limits of the available channel. As a matter of prudence, they are loading the Gaschem Hamburg to 90%, roughly 18 KT, to safely dock the ship.
The 2013 article discussed a national project to build a major port at La Union, one big enough to bring in container ships and ease traffic congestion at Acajutla, El Salvador’s major port for everything including all the refined products used in the country.
In the earlier writeup, we thought that the La Union port project would simply be a buildout and expansion of what was already at Puerto Corsain. But that is not the case. The big port project is being built about a half mile west of Puerto Corsain, as is evident from photos on Google Earth.
The new Puerto La Union has fallen way behind schedule, and El Diario de Hoy, El Salvador’s main paper, has been running sporadic articles wondering when this major facility will be ready for service. A prime issue is the channel depth needed to get container ships farther back up the shore than at Puerto Corsain. The country keeps promising to initiate major dragging operations, but these have been repeatedly postponed.
According to the latest information on Central American LPG terminals, Martinez says his terminal vaults into second place, behind only Zetagas Guatemala at 57.6 KT. He puts total Central American terminal capacity at 130 KT, with Zeta at 57.6, Tropigas SV at 24.0, Tomza (Guatemala and Honduras) at 19.7, Recope (Costa Rica) at 10.0, Alba-Nisa (Nicaragua) at 6.0, and Petroport (Panama) at 5.0. Rounding out the group is Texaco, with 7.6 KT at terminals in Honduras and Panama.