The Catalan Regional Government’s Minister for Business and Employment visits the CLH storage facility in Barcelona

• During the visit, the Chairman of CLH, José Luis López de Silanes, explained about the company's activity and the safety and environmental protection measures that have been adopted at the plant.

The Catalan Regional Government's Minister for Business and Employment, Felip Puig, and the General Manager of Industry, Antoni María Grau accompanied by the Chairman of the CLH Group, José Luis López de Silanes, visited the Barcelona storage facility today with the aim of finding out more about the way the plant and its control and environmental protection systems operate.

The Barcelona facility is the main CLH oil product storage and distribution centre in Catalonia. The plant is located near the city's port and is able to receive oil discharges from tankers.

The facility has a storage capacity of more than 475,000 cubic metres and an automated tank truck loading area with 12 racks and 44 loading arms, that operates around the clock every day of the year.

The plant is fitted out with state-of-the-art technology, which allows it to function in a fully automated way and for it to be operated from a control room.

The centre also has the most advanced safety systems that are adapted to the special characteristics of the fuels, as well as a continuous automated surveillance system and various prevention systems, such as safety distances between the tanks that have water-tight bunding to separate them, in addition to floating roofs in the tanks and anti-overflow systems.

Environmental protection is also very much at the forefront at the facility. The plant holds the ISO 14001 environmental certificate granted by AENOR, and has a number of different environmental protection systems that include a rainwater collection network that is separate from the hydrocarbon-polluted water network, a hydrocarbon-polluted water treatment system, a vapour recovery unit, tanks fitted with internal floating roofs and water-tight bund walls around the base of each tank.

CLH presence in Catalonia

The CLH Group is the leading company in the Spanish market for the transportation and storage of oil products, with a pipeline network more than 4,000 kilometres long and 39 storage facilities, with a total capacity of 7.9 million cubic metres, as well as 28 airport facilities

In addition to the Barcelona facility, the company has another three storage centres in Catalonia, located in Tarragona, Gerona and Lérida. The CLH pipeline network in this autonomous region is 340 kilometres long and connects all the facilities to one another, linking up with the rest of the pipeline in the province of Lérida.

Through its subsidiary CLH Aviación, the company is also present at Gerona and Barcelona airports, with two plants that provide into-plane services for aircraft refuelling.

All told, the CLH Group has a storage capacity of more than 700,000 cubic metres in Catalonia.

In 2013, the company supplied 5.6 million cubic metres of fuel to the various oil companies that trade in this autonomous region, to meet the needs of end-users.