New berthing facilities are being built for VLCCs, officials said Tuesday to Reuters.
Fujairah has grown rapidly to become the world's second-largest bunkering fuel hub after Singapore.
The UAE plans to expand Fujairah's crude storage to 12 mill barrels, from 8 mill barrels, a government official said at a conference.
Fujairah currently has eight storage tanks, each with 1 mill barrels capacity, and foundations have been laid for four new tanks, said Salem Abdo Khalil, a technical adviser to the Fujairah government.
No date has been set for completion of the new storage, he said.
The tank farm is supplied by the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline. The 400 km 42-inch pipeline can move up to 1.5 mill barrels per day, or around 70% of Abu Dhabi's production from its onshore oil fields at Habshan in the UAE’s western region, allowing it to bypass the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck.
The project, VLCC-1, is being built by a consortium of Belgium's Six Construct and Singapore's Rotary Engineering, which signed a contract with Port of Fujairah authorities in late August, the source said to Reuters.
VLCC-1 will have about 450,000 cu m of storage. According to the source, energy trading company Vopak has committed to around 60% of the throughput for the facility. The remainder is open to other trading companies.
Construction should be complete in mid-2016. The port authority is expected to make a decision before the end of 2015 as to whether to further expand berthing facilities for a so-called VLCC-2 project with the same contractors, or to release a fresh tender.
Fujairah's oil terminal 1 was commissioned in 2006, with three 15 m water depth berths and a throughput capacity of 15 mill tonnes per year, handling tankers of up to 110,000 dwt. Oil terminal 2 was commissioned in 2010 with four berths of 18 m in depth and a throughput capacity of 25 mill tonnes per year and can handle tankers up to 180,000 dwt.