The pipeline you see snaking through the Talamarca mountains in certain areas when traveling between Chiriqui province and Chiriqui Grande in Bocas province belongs to Petroterminal de Panama SA, PTP. It runs for 81 miles through some of the most difficult terrain you can imagine. Although the pipeline was built 30 years ago it pumped oil from the Pacific to the Atlantic taking Alaskan crude to ships heading for the gulf coast refineries. Now they have reversed the flow in order to bring oil from Angola, Colombia and Venezuela to refineries on the U.S. west coast. As soon as the rest of the storage facilities are completed on either end, they will be pumping an initial 65,000 barrels of oil a day through the province. The capacity of the pipeline is an amazing 860,000 barrels a day. Deep water ports on either side of the isthmus allow oil tankers to get close to shore to offload and take on oil. Panama currently owns 40% of the company. You can learn more details on this project from Wikipedia.
La Prensa
Wilfredo S. Jordan
[email protected] [email protected]
Petroterminal de Panama SA (PTP) completed the first two phases of expansion of the pipeline and began working on the third stage which will comprise a total investment of $ 450 million.
The first phase of expansion was the reversal of the pipeline to pump crude from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After completing the work and perform the tests, "on 27 August we received the first barrel of oil from the Atlantic," said the manager of PTP, Luis Roquebert.
The second phase of the project involved the construction of five tanks to store 3.4 million barrels of oil, of which three were erected in the Pacific sector and two in the Atlantic.
For the third phase additional ten tanks will be built with an investment of $ 375 million. The work of this third phase already began in early October, according Roquebert. On April 10 PTP turned 30 years of operations in Panama.
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