History
The Trans-Panama Pipeline was opened in 1982 as an alternative to carry crude oil from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1980s in average twenty supertankers, each with a capacity of a million barrels of crude oil, arrived each month at Puerto Armuelles from Valdez in Alaska, for transportation to the Caribbean Sea. Between 1982 and 1996 the pipeline transported 2.7 billion barrels of Alaskan oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast ports. After declining Alaskan oil shipments, the pipeline was closed in 1996. In November 2003, the Trans-Panama pipeline was re-opened for transportation of Ecuadorian crude oil to U.S. Gulf ports.
In 2005, Venezuela began talks about reverse using the pipeline for its oil exports to China. In May 2008, BP signed an agreement with Petroterminal de Panama S.A., according to which the pipeline was modernized and reversed to ship BP's Angolan and other crude oil to the U.S. West Coast refineries. BP acquired 5 million barrels (790×103 m3) of storage capacities and committed to secure shipments of 65 thousand barrels per day (10.3×103 m3/d). On 28 August 2009, Tesoro oil company started reverse oil shipments through the pipeline to supply the Atlantic Basin oil to the Pacific Rim refineries.
On 15 October 2009, Petroterminal de Panama S.A. signed a contract with Chicago Bridge & Iron Company to design and contsruct the second-phase expansion of terminal storage facilities.
Read more about this topic: Trans-Panama Pipeline
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)