UAE's Fujairah port approves two new jetties in trading boost

The UAE's Port of Fujairah, the world's third-biggest bunkering hub, approved adding two more jetties to serve liquid bulk vessels, allowing for some 20 million mt/year of more throughput, the port's business development manager Martijn Heijboer told S&P Global Commodity Insights.

Work on the expansion is about to start and should take 18 months to complete, Heijboer said Feb. 27 on the sidelines of the London Energy Forum.

Each jetty should add about 10 million mt/year throughput capacity. There are currently nine jetties.

Fujairah's throughput, or combined imports and exports of all refined oil products and crude oil, was expected to be about 97 million mt in 2023 from 102 million mt in 2022 but up from 92 million mt in 2021, Heijboer said in October.

The number of oil tankers calling at the port was likely to be a record, close to 4,800 vessel calls compared with 4,720 in 2022, he said at the time.

Ships ready to deliver or load cargoes of oil products to the port have to wait on average seven hours before a jetty becomes available, he said in October.

To capture growth and maintain or improve services, new jetties were needed, Heijboer said. For the port's offshore service business, bunker sales dropped to 7.5 million cu m in 2023 from 8.1 million cu m in 2022.

In January, bunker sales climbed to a five-month high, but Heijboer said on a panel at the forum that the Red Sea attacks on commercial shipping have not been much of a factor in the number of ships calling at the port for loading and unloading.

"It has been more or less the same," he said. "We were hoping to see an uptick on the bunkering, but the January numbers seem steady. Let us see what happens when the February numbers come out."

The oil coming into the port is from the region, not from Europe or the US, he said. "Nothing really goes through the Suez for the regions that we serve and so we are not affected by what is happening in the Red Sea."