Tk8,298 Crore Oil Pipeline Finally Gets an Operator After Sitting Idle for Two Years

Bangladesh has finally found an operator for the offshore oil pipeline it built for Tk8,298 crore and then largely could not use, more than two years after construction wrapped up. The Chittagong Council of Government Purchase Committee this week approved an Indonesian state owned company, PT Pertamina Trans Kontinental, to run the Single Point Mooring system off Maheshkhali, ending a search that had already failed once and left one of the country's biggest energy infrastructure investments sitting largely idle since March 2024.

The SPM is, on paper, exactly the kind of project that should have paid for itself quickly. It lets large crude and diesel tankers moor far offshore and pump fuel directly through an undersea pipeline to storage tanks on land, cutting out the slow, costly practice of lightering, where fuel is transferred ship to ship into smaller vessels that can navigate closer to shore. Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation says the system can move 100,000 tonnes of crude in about 48 hours and 70,000 tonnes of diesel in roughly 28, compared with the 10 to 12 days lightering can take. BPC has pointed to projected annual savings of Tk500 to 600 crore once the system runs at scale, down somewhat from earlier estimates of Tk700 to 800 crore, which is still a substantial dent in the fuel logistics bill for a country that imports the overwhelming majority of its petroleum needs.

A pipeline finished, then left waiting

The gap between that promise and reality has been the real story of the SPM for two years running. Construction began in 2018 and dragged through four deadline extensions before the system was commissioned and completed trial runs in March 2024, with a formal taking over certificate issued that August. From there, the project needed exactly one more thing to start earning its keep commercially: an operator qualified to run offshore mooring and pipeline operations at the scale involved. That search became its own saga. A first international tender in April 2025 was cancelled after the winning bid came in 51 percent over the government's own cost estimate, an outcome that sent BPC back to the drawing board for a second tender in December 2025. That process finally produced Pertamina Trans Kontinental as the successful bidder, but final Cabinet level approval did not follow until this month, meaning the contractor's own 18 month defect liability period had already expired in August, before the facility it maintained had ever gone into regular commercial service.

The new contract runs five years and is worth roughly Tk1,946 to 1,950 crore, or about 159 million dollars including taxes, for Pertamina to operate and maintain the system. BPC expects the SPM to become commercially operational around December 2026 or January 2027, assuming no further delay in a process that has already blown through its original timeline several times over.

What two years of delay actually cost

Industry estimates place the cost of the delay itself at somewhere between Tk1,000 and 1,200 crore in missed savings across the two years the completed pipeline sat without a commercial operator, savings that would otherwise have come from the lightering costs the SPM was built specifically to eliminate. That is a notable number set against the debt BPC has already been servicing regardless of whether the asset was earning anything. The corporation has repaid Tk3,077 crore in project related loans to date, and a further Tk690 crore installment comes due by December, arriving just as the system is finally expected to start generating the offsetting revenue and savings that were supposed to justify the debt in the first place.

Md Rafiqul Islam, BPC's chairman, has said the SPM's design was built with Eastern Refinery's planned second unit, known as ERL-2, in mind, and that contractual timelines around the operator handover had to be respected regardless of how long the facility had already been sitting idle. That comment points to the deeper limiting factor on this project, one that will persist even after Pertamina takes over operations. The SPM was engineered for an annual crude throughput of 4.5 million tonnes, but current usage runs at only about 1.5 million tonnes, roughly a third of designed capacity, because Eastern Refinery cannot yet process more than that. ERL-2, the expansion that would let the refinery actually use the SPM's full capacity, is not due for completion until November 2030. In effect, Bangladesh built a pipeline sized for a refinery capacity it will not have for another four years, and even once the mooring system does become fully operational as a piece of infrastructure, the bulk of its rated capacity will keep sitting unused until that separate refinery project catches up.

A familiar pattern in Bangladesh's big infrastructure bets

The SPM's troubles echo a pattern that has shown up elsewhere in Bangladesh's major energy and infrastructure projects this year, big capital outlays that clear construction milestones on paper well before the complementary pieces, whether operators, financing, or connected facilities, are actually in place to let the asset earn a return. The government's finances have been under particular strain from exactly this kind of mismatch: the fiscal year saw government bank borrowing overshoot its own revised target by more than Tk47,500 crore, driven in large part by a revenue shortfall at the National Board of Revenue, a squeeze that leaves less room to absorb the kind of stranded capital an idle Tk8,298 crore pipeline represents. Every month the SPM sat unused after its March 2024 completion was, in effect, debt service without matching revenue, a dynamic that compounds quietly until an asset finally switches on.

For BPC and the wider fuel import chain, the operator appointment removes the most immediate obstacle, but not the underlying one. Getting Pertamina's contract signed and operations running by early 2027 would finally let Bangladesh capture at least the Tk500 to 600 crore in annual logistics savings the project was designed to deliver. Getting anywhere close to the full Tk700 to 800 crore of upside originally envisioned, or the 4.5 million tonne throughput the pipeline was actually built for, depends on a refinery expansion that is still four years away, a reminder that in large infrastructure, finishing the highest profile piece of a project is often the easier half of the job.

Metric	Figure
Total SPM project cost	Tk8,298 crore
New five-year operator contract value (Pertamina)	Tk1,946-1,950 crore (~$159 million)
Loans already repaid by BPC	Tk3,077 crore
Next loan installment due (December 2026)	Tk690 crore
Estimated cost of two-year delay in missed savings	Tk1,000-1,200 crore
Projected annual savings once operational	Tk500-600 crore (down from earlier Tk700-800 crore estimate)
Designed annual crude capacity vs current usage	4.5 million tonnes designed vs ~1.5 million tonnes used