Saudi Arabia and Singapore announced on Monday a joint intention to store Saudi crude oil in Singapore, in an arrangement the two energy ministries said would support Singapore’s energy needs in a supply disruption and strengthen the resilience of the Saudi crude supply chain in Southeast Asia. Saudi Aramco exchanged a memorandum of understanding with Singapore’s Energy Market Authority and JTC Corporation during Singapore International Energy Week, as the first step toward the arrangement, with negotiations targeted to conclude within a few months.
Under the proposal, Saudi crude would be stored in the Jurong Rock Caverns on Jurong Island, with storage operations expected to begin in the second half of 2027. The caverns sit about 150 metres underground and can hold up to 1.47 million cubic metres of liquid hydrocarbons, roughly nine million barrels of crude oil and condensate. Neither government stated the volume Aramco would store or the commercial terms, and the memorandum records an intention to negotiate, not a final storage contract.
The plan extends a storage strategy Aramco already runs elsewhere in Asia, with crude stored in Okinawa in Japan, where capacity was expanded to 8.2 million barrels in 2017, and in Ulsan in South Korea under a 5.3 million barrel arrangement agreed in 2023. In those arrangements the host government holds priority access to the stored crude in an emergency, and Singapore’s purchase rights and release procedures will be part of the terms still to be negotiated.
Singapore’s minister for energy, trade and industry, Tan See Leng, announced the plan in a speech that warned about continued disruption to flows through the Strait of Hormuz and the risk of escalation after Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure. Energy is an existential priority for Singapore, he said. The city state also signed a liquefied natural gas cooperation memorandum with Thailand’s PTT through GasCo, and last week renewed LNG cooperation with QatarEnergy and signed a joint energy taskforce memorandum with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.