On July 30, in Nueva Palmira, Terminal de Líquidos Uruguay (TLU), was inaugurated. This is the first plant of the country foreseen to provide services to third parties, with direct connection to the port. The new infrastructure enables to reduce costs derived from the maritime transport of liquids and also ensures that they are discharged under strict environmental measures, acknowledged and approved by the National Environmental Office (Dinama).
The terminal, located 550 meters from Nueva Palmira’s public pier, operates with state of the art equipment that transports liquids directly from the vessels to five tanks built with a total capacity of 11,000 m³. Five operators work at TLU.
Built with materials that offer maximum levels of security such as stainless steel, tracts are joined by certified weldings, with no armored joints, thus minimizing the possibility of losses. The pipeline was installed externally for easy control and monitoring of its condition, with the exception of the tract that passes below Paraná street, that counts with jacketing and a leak detection system, which allows immediate detection of a possible loss.
During the first stage, operations at TLU will be exclusively linked to the agricultural sector, as the terminal will be used for storing and dispatching liquid fertilizers traded by Petrobras, who up to now had to import this kind of supplies by land from Argentina.
40,000 tons per year of UAN (Urea Ammonium Nitrate) are managed with the new infrastructure, representing 60% of the total volume of fertilizers used in Uruguay.
The first dispatch was performed on June 22 from a vessel that transported 6,000 tons of UAN. It reached an unloading rhythm of 500 tons per hour. Days later, the UAN was loaded in trucks, reaching an attention average oscillating between eight and ten trucks per day.
On this first stage, a vessel per month is expected, and the rest of the time will be devoted to the distribution of the product and emptying of the tanks.
TLU is a dynamic project to the extent that Schandy has submitted to the National Environmental Office a proposal for the expansion of the terminal and subsequent creation of new business opportunities. In this sense, the building of tanks for the storage of other liquids such as vegetable oil and fuels is foreseen. This shall constitute an important contribution to the logistics infrastructure that regional producers require.