A familiar site in Yarmouth Harbour will be gone in about 18 months.
Irving Oil is decommissioning its Bunker’s Island fuel storage facility.
The company purchased the 13-hectares and built the facility in 1967.
Mark Sherman, Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer for Irving Oil says the Bunker’s Island facility has become redundant.
He says it began a couple of years ago with the announcement of the closure of the Imperial Oil refinery in Dartmouth.
Sherman says Irving Oil made an $80 million dollar investment in a new harbour facility in Halifax last fall to help provide supply security to Nova Scotians in response to the gas shortage in 2015 when poor weather delayed supply ships.
“Then on top of that Valero approached Irving Oil and we bought four inland bulk terminals around the province,…Yarmouth, Bridgewater, New Glasgow and Port Hawkesbury. So now we ended up with some redundancy in Yarmouth.”
Sherman says work on the dismantling of the two large storage tanks and piping will begin in the next three or four weeks but there will be some site preparation taking place in the next two weeks.
He says they plan on using local contractors as long a they have the capacity to do the work.
He says the decommissioning will take 18 months to two years to complete.
