FUTURE-PROOFING A TERMINAL

Colin Horton from Oikos Storage in the UK speaks to Tank Storage Magazine about recent expansions and future plans.   THE Oikos Storage terminal is situated on a 28 ha site about 65 km to the east of London, on Canvey Island in Essex, UK. It has more than 35 tanks with a total capacity of around 300,000 tonnes, and is the only independent terminal in the UK with access to the deep water navigable channel of the River Thames, and connected to the UK’s national fuel distribution pipeline networks. The terminal started operations in 1936 as a general purpose terminal, storing a mixture of chemicals and hydrocarbons, and has been in continual operation ever since. Colin Horton is its commercial and strategy director, and joined the site almost by accident 11 years ago. The tanks had been full of tallow for many years following the BSE crisis in the UK, and the site was bought by an Australian investor, who brought Horton in as a consultant. ‘The tanks were very tired,’ he remembers. ‘I came in to do a two-week consultancy and I quickly identified that the real key to this was that they were connected to two pipelines –the [UK Oil Pipeline] UKOP and the [Compañía...