Sweet brings over 30 years of energy industry experience in refining, supply, trading and logistics to his new role. Most recently, he was executive vice president and president of refining and supply at Axeon Specialty Products, where he was responsible for overseeing all of Axeon’s refining, supply, trading and transportation functions.

Prior to that, Sweet spent 25 years at Hess, where he was most recently senior vice president of refining, terminals and supply and oversaw Hess’ network of petroleum terminals, supply, trading and refining interests. He began his career in the oil industry as an engineer with Exxon and later as a supply analyst with Mobil.

ArcLight, through an affiliate, manages and owns an 80% interest in LB Terminals; Freepoint owns a 20% interest.

LB Terminals recently purchased the assets of Hovensa’s St. Croix facility consisting of approximately 32 million bbl of crude oil and petroleum product storage, idled refinery units with total peak processing capacity of 650,000 b/d, a deep-water port with 10 petroleum docks, one bulk product dock, six tug boats, and various associated equipment and inventory.

LB Terminals has already executed a 10-year lease agreement for 10 million bbl of storage capacity with China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) as well as a series of other lease agreements.

Sweet joins a new leadership team at LB Terminals that includes Sloan Schoyer, vice president of operations, and Keith Neal, vice president of commercial. Schoyer spent 26 years with Hess in refining and marketing and an additional 13 years as director of marine and terminal operations at Hovensa, the prior owner of the St. Croix facility.

Neal has over 20 years’ experience in crude and petroleum products trading and has a strong logistical background, with his most recent role at Buckeye Partners.

The LB Terminals restart team is fully engaged and expects to bring its first tanks back into service as early as April 2016, ArcLight said.

OPIS reported in January that the new owner of the Hovensa oil terminal at St. Croix in the Caribbean is expected to see a full operational restart of 13 million bbl oil storage capacity at that facility within a few months after taking over the recently acquired facility on Jan. 8, 2016.

In the initial restart phase, the terminal in the U.S. Virgin Islands with a maximum 32-million-bbl storage capacity, will bring on 13 million bbl of storage by April. The quick turnaround on restarting the mothballed tanks is attributed to the relatively well maintained tanks at Hovensa.

The first 13 million bbl of capacity is already spoken for. Sinopec will take over 10 million bbl of capacity, and Freepoint Commodities, a minority stake owner of Limetree Bay, will take over 3 million bbl.

In the second phase, an additional 13 million bbl of storage capacity would be brought onstream by the end of summer, depending on demand from potential customers.

These Caribbean tanks could be used for storing and blending crude as well as storing gasoline, diesel, propane and fuel oil.

The quick restart means that Sinopec, one of the largest oil companies in the world, will emerge as a major crude player in the Caribbean very soon.

OPIS reported that the storage lease at St. Croix represented the first for Sinopec and Unipec, the oil trading arm of Sinopec, in the Caribbean. Unipec will join its Chinese rival, PetroChina, in the Caribbean market. PetroChina has storage tanks at BORCO terminal in the Bahamas.