Eastham Oil Terminal is situated close to the small town of Eastham on the

Wirral Peninsula Wirral (; ), known locally as The Wirral, is a peninsula in North West England. The roughly rectangular peninsula is about long and wide and is bounded by the River Dee to the west (forming the boundary with Wales), the River Mersey to ...

, beside the Manchester Ship Canal. It was commissioned in 1954 close to the Queen Elizabeth II Dock and is a storage and export facility for oil products refined at

Stanlow Refinery Stanlow Refinery is an oil refinery owned by Essar Energy in Ellesmere Port, North West England. Until 2011 it was owned by Shell UK. The refinery is situated on the south bank of the Manchester Ship Canal, which is used to transport seaborne o ...

, to which it is connected by pipeline. The site is currently operated by Nynas.

History

Construction of the Eastham oil terminal began in 1949 in association with the Queen Elizabeth II Dock. These facilities were built near Eastham locks at entrance of the Manchester Ship Canal on the

River Mersey The River Mersey () is in North West England. Its name derives from Old English and means "boundary river", possibly referring to its having been a border between the ancient kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. For centuries it has formed par ...

. The new facilities at Eastham provided berthing for large tankers unable to access the ship canal. Pipelines were constructed from Stanlow Oil Refinery to the oil terminal and the dock. The construction cost of the terminal £7 million. The facilities became operational in 1954. Tanker sizes increased rapidly during the 1950s, and as early as 1960 it was recognised that the Eastham terminal was limited as the water there was not deep enough for the 65,000 ton tankers that were then becoming commonplace. This led to the construction of the

Tranmere oil terminal Tranmere Oil Terminal is situated on the River Mersey, south of Birkenhead. It was opened on 8 June 1960 to handle vessels of up to 65,000 tons, at two berths (North and South). It is connected to the Stanlow Oil Refinery by a pipeline. Part o ...

further downstream from where crude oil feedstock for Stanlow refinery is offloaded.

Other facilities

Other companies built processing and storage facilities at Eastham. Paktank built a bulk liquid tank farm (53°18'51.5"N 2°57'11.2"W) to the west of the oil terminal. In 1975

Tate & Lyle Tate & Lyle PLC is a British-headquartered, global supplier of food and beverage ingredients to industrial markets. It was originally a sugar refining business, but from the 1970s it began to diversify, eventually divesting its sugar business i ...

had a 50% stake in the terminal. The terminal was later owned and operated by NuStar Terminals Eastham Limited. In 2018 Inter Terminals acquired NuStar's European storage terminal business. This facility is currently (2020) operated by Inter Terminals. There are 157 tanks with a total storage capacity of 325,198 m³. There are four jetties for vessels and the terminal receives from, and delivers to, sea and road. In 2015 there was a proposal by Hydrodec Re-refining (UK) Limited to construct a hazardous waste recovery facility at Power House Road, Eastham comprising a waste oil re-refining plant together with associated development. This has not been developed.

Eastham refinery

A small refinery, Eastham Refinery Ltd., was constructed at Eastham in 1966 to the east of the tank farm. This was a joint venture between Tarmac Ltd. and Phillips Petroleum of America (Philips 66) and traded under the name of Philmac Oil Ltd. The refinery took heavy naphthenic crude as a feedstock and produced bitumen and other distillate products such as gas oil, marine diesel, lubricating base stocks. The throughput in the 1970s was 400,000 tonnes per year. In 1989 the unit was expanded to provide a capacity of 1.2 million tonnes per year. Eastham refinery was later operated by Briggs Oil in a joint venture with Shell. Briggs Oil was acquired by the Swedish firm AB Nynas Petroleum in 1992 for £70 million; Shell retained its interest in the plant. In 1992 the refinery comprised a vacuum distillation unit with a capacity of 10,500 barrels/day (1,669 m³/day) producing 8,000 barrels/day (1272 m³/day) of

asphalt Asphalt, also known as bitumen (, ), is a sticky, black, highly viscous liquid or semi-solid form of petroleum. It may be found in natural deposits or may be a refined product, and is classed as a pitch. Before the 20th century, the term ...

. The

Energy Institute The Energy Institute (EI) is a professional organization for engineers and other professionals in energy-related fields. The EI was formed in 2003 by the merger of the Institute of Petroleum (dating back to 1913) and the Institute of Energy (d ...

noted that the refinery closed in 2010.Energy Institute, ''EI Datasheet 07, UK refining distillation capacity'', January 2019 However, Eastham Refinery Ltd still operated a bitumen plant in 2017. The plant produces bitumen by a 2-stage distillation process using crude oil and refinery residues as feedstock. Crude oil is received by pipeline from the nearby Tranmere terminal and the residues by pipeline from the Queen Elizabeth II dock. The raw materials and product are stored in a tank farm on the site. In 2015 the plant processed 978,472 tonnes of feedstock oil. The plant uses a combination of an atmospheric distillation column and a vacuum column to separate oil into various final components.

References

External links

Nynas Group
{{Coord, 53, 18, 45.16, N, 2, 56, 49.96, W, region:GB, display=title Buildings and structures in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral Mersey docks Petroleum infrastructure in the United Kingdom Oil terminals