Shipping traffic at the four land facilities operated by Statoil in Norway and Denmark reached record levels in 2001.
Almost 259 million barrels of crude were shipped from the Mongstad refinery near Bergen, reports port captain Jon Magne Jakobsen.
This means that the facility receives, stores and exports more than a third of the oil produced annually by Statoil and the Norwegian state.
Mongstad ranks as Europe’s second-largest oil port in terms of volume after Rotterdam.
Traffic was also high at the Kårstø treatment complex north of Stavanger, with records set for both volume of products exported and the number of vessel calls.
According to port manager Per Arne Nilsen, the facility had 600 calls in 2001 compared with 421 the year before.
Roughly 4.5 million tonnes of normal butane, iso-butane, naphtha, propane and ethane were shipped out – an increase of 60 per cent from 2000.
The 3.3 million tonnes of condensate (light oil) exported was roughly on a par with the year before.
This rise in shipments partly reflects deliveries from Statoil’s Åsgard field in the Norwegian Sea and the start to ethane production at Kårstø.
Almost 850,000 tonnes of methanol were exported from the Tjeldbergodden industrial complex in mid-Norway, an increase of 90,000 tonnes from the previous record in 1999.
And 854 ship calls were logged by the refinery at Kalundborg near Copenhagen, up by 66 from 2000. No less than 708 of them related to exports of oil products.