United Riverhead Terminal, owner and operator of the petroleum storage facilities and offshore platform in Northville, is looking to convert two of its oil storage tanks for gasoline storage.
The company, an affiliate of Pennsylvania-based United Refining Company, has filed a special permit application with the Riverhead Town Board, Supervisor Sean Walter said during last night’s town board meeting, answering a question about pipes being laid in the roadway in the vicinity of the facilities.
“This is a direct result of Hurricane Sandy,” Walter said, referring to the gasoline shortage following the storm that knocked out power on Long Island and interrupted the wholesale fuel supply chain for days.
United Riverhead Terminal’s general manager Scott Kamm confirmed the application this morning.
“The terminal had received several requests from government and emergency response officials during and after the storm asking us to supply them with gasoline,” Kamm said in an email. “United Riverhead Terminal was the only terminal unaffected by the storm, while New York Harbor was shut down,” he wrote. “The terminal is looking to add gasoline distribution to ensure the East End is supplied in the aftermath of another major storm.”
The pipeline being buried in the roads leading to the facility has nothing to do with the conversion, however.
That’s a natural gas line being extended to the facility to convert “its high-emission boilers to clean natural gas,” Kamm said. The boilers are used to heat tanks in which crude or heavy fuel oil is stored, according to the company website.
The natural gas line extension is about 4,000 feet long, according to Victor Prusinowski, a consultant to the company. It’s coming from west of Northville Turnpike east on Sound Avenue, up Penny’s Road to Sound Shore Road and the United Riverhead Terminal facility, he said. That work, being undertaken by a National Grid contractor, started in the past month and will take about another three weeks to complete, Prusinowski said.
Prusinowski said he and representatives of United Terminal are scheduled to meet with the town board during its work session tomorrow morning, to discuss the tank conversion proposal and procedures for processing the application. The company will have to obtain a town board special permit and then site plan approval from the planning board.
“It’s not a very big construction project,” Prusinowski said, adding that the state DEC has already approved the plan.
“It’s really a matter of converting a couple of bays to gasoline,” Prusinowski said. “There’s not a lot of site work involved.”
There should be minimal traffic impacts, he said, because truck traffic is expected to be fewer than 12 trips per day.
Some of the 20 storage tanks at the 286-acre waterfront site in Northville date back to the 1950s, built by Northville Industries. Additional tanks and the off-shore platform date back to the 1960s. The platform is located 30 miles from the Atlantic Ocean and one mile offshore in the deepest channel on the east coast, according to United Riverhead Terminal. “This enables large ships to come from the Atlantic from all points of the globe, thereby avoiding the Port of New York/New Jersey” 80 miles to the west, according to URT.
The facility has a storage capacity of 5.2 million barrels. Product is stored at the terminal and reloaded onto ocean-going barges for all parts of the East Coast. It is also dispensed at the on-site truck rack.
United Riverhead Terminal Inc. purchased the site from Phillips 66 in 2012. It is the fifth owner-operator of the facility in its nearly 60-year history. Philllips 66 was spun off from ConocoPhillips earlier that year. ConocoPhillips was formed in 2002, when Conoco Inc. merged with Phillips Petroleum, which had purchased the facilities from Tosco Corp. in 2001. Tosco bought the site from Northville Industries in 1992. Northville Industries developed the site in the 1950s and -60s.
Correction: A previously published version of this article misstated the storage capacity of the facility.
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