Bay of Bengal-Chittagong Oil Pipeline

This article is part of the Global Fossil Infrastructure Tracker, a project of Global Energy Monitor.

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Bay of Bengal-Chittagong Oil Pipeline is part of an offshore-onshore oil pipeline project, currently under construction in Bangladesh. It is one of two pipelines associated with Bangladesh's Single Point Mooring (SPM) and Parallel Pipeline Project.

Location

The proposed pipeline route runs from tankers in the Bay of Bengal to Moheshkhali Island, Bangladesh, and then to Eastern Refineries Ltd (ইস্টার্ণ রিফাইনারী লিমিটেড), Chittagong district, Bangladesh.

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Project Details

• Operator: Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC)
• Owner: Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC)
• Parent company: Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC)
• Capacity:
• Length: 137 mi / 220 km
• Diameter:
• Status: Construction
• Start year: 2023
• Cost:
• Financing:
• Associated infrastructure: Bay of Bengal-Chittagong Oil Pipeline 2

Background

In December 2016, the government of Bangladesh reached agreement with China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Co., Ltd. (previously the China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau; CPP) for engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning for installation of a SPM system for two parallel 220-km pipelines—the Bay of Bengal-Chittagong oil pipeline and the Bay of Bengal-Chittagong oil pipeline 2. CPP will build a 146-km offshore pipeline and 74-km onshore pipeline to carry imported oil from sea to a refinery in Chittagong district for processing. A diesel and crude oil storage tank will also be set up at Moheshkhali Island on the Bay of Bengal in Bangladeshi Cox's Bazar district. Oil from the pipeline will be refined in Chittagong, and ultimately piped to China.

The project was launched because Bangladesh is incapable of handling large vessels carrying imported crude and finished oil, due to low navigability of a key river channel and constrained facilities at the main seaport in Chittagong. (At present, large tankers anchor at deep sea and smaller ships unload them, however this process takes time and causes systematic losses for the government.)

Although the project start was delayed, in June 2019, the first horizontal directional drilling crossing of the Single Point Mooring and Parallel-pipeline Project in Bangladesh (SPM project) was successfully pulled back, and the first directional drilling of the SPM project was completed.

In January 2020 CPP announced that that the SPM subsea installation began on December 23, 2019. The pipeline diameters are 18 and 36 inches. In July 2020 the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) gave a new estimated completion date of June 2022 for the pipeline.

As of May 30th, 2021, 75 percent of the on-site construction work had been completed.

The Buoy of the Single Point Mooring (SPM) is likely to installed in February 2022.

As of September 2022, 88 percent work had been completed. In late 2022, it was reported that a revised deadline for completion was June 2023.

As of August 2023, the pipeline was still under construction. As of May 2024 there was no evidence that the pipeline had become operational.