Adel Al Moayyed Chairman of Bapco’s Board and Acting Chief Executive opened the Distribution Point at Al Hidd Industrial in presence of Ebrahim Taleb Deputy Chief Executive Refining and Marketing, General Managers and other Bapco officials and praised the staff for carrying out the utmost professional job in completion of the new distribution facility.
“The opening of new distribution is in line with Bapco’s vision aimed at enhancing the natural gas supply in the Kingdom and meet the growing demand on diesel in the local market”, he added. “Bapco has an ongoing interest in launching such projects which meet the local market demands and support the industry trends in Bahrain.”
“The new facility will serve different existing and future industries in the Kingdom of Bahrain through the provision of required diesel supply to the market,” Almoayyed said, adding that Bapco would continue to add such core projects which play a pivotal role in supporting the industry drives, boosting its role as a major supporter of the national economy.
“The new diesel distribution point with multiple terminals and capacity of one million litres per day has the capacity of 4m litres per day,” Ebrahim Talib told the 24X7 News on the sidelines of the opening of the facility.
“The new facility currently caters for 70 to 80 tankers a day with roughly daily capacity of one million litres and it takes about 30 minutes for a tanker to fill compared to eight hours waiting time in the past at the old facility in Riffa,” Nooruddin Ebrahim, Manager, Local Marketing Department, said.
“We have deployed the best technology and the location of the facility with much more capacity to accommodate tankers will make the entire process of refilling much efficient in the best safest environment,” he said.
About the regulating the diesel as commodity and discourage the smuggling diesel he said that Bapco’s marketing team take the supply very seriously and visits were carried out to assess and determine the actual demand of diesel upon each supply request.
In Bahrain the diesel price is 100 fils per litre and is much lower than neighbouring markets. There have been some reports of smuggling of diesel for which all government agencies including Bapco were trying to put an end to the illegal trade of diesel. The subsidy on diesel is part of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s policy to support the industrial sector in general and SMEs in specific.
“Not only the first visit but it is a continuous process and Bapco minimise the possibility of illegal trade or misuse the subsidy,” he added.