In the beginning

In 1969, there was a group of islets with a total area of some 118 ha at the southwest of Singapore. These islets were reclaimed individually over the years by JTC after its formation in 1968, for allocation to oil refineries and petrochemical companies. By 1986, we had enlarged these islets to give us a total of some 1,000 ha of land area. But our industrial land projection showed that there would not be enough land to meet long term needs. Hence, an idea came up to see if the land stock could be increased by joining up the islands, through the reclamation of the waters separating the islands and to enlarge, and extending the reclamation southwest wards to see to what extent we could create out more land out from the sea.

Working on the vision that it was not impossible, a preliminary plan was drawn up and tested. It was found that it was hydro-dynamically workable.

Birth of the petrochemical industry

In 1989, a decision was made that Singapore was to develop its petrochemical industry and turn it into a world class petrochemical hub. It was a daunting task. We had to find the land and build almost all the infrastructure from scratch. Fortuitously, as JTC was already planning to reclaim the Jurong Island; this island would turn out to be a perfect place to house this new initiative.

JTC was thus appointed as the government agent to spearhead the project, with the support from many agencies, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of National Development, Economic Development Board, the then Public Works Department, Ministry of Environment, Public Utilities Board, the then Singapore Telecom etc, without which the project would not be a success.

Challenges faced in the early days

There were many challenges that we had to deal with, in short, problems, of which many were unforeseen by the then-team of young engineers. We had to carry out the engineering work to reclaim the sea, while taking care of the existing tenants who had to maintain operations as the reclamation work was carried out. In particular, we had to take great care to ensure that the utility cables and pipes, and production lines were not damaged, avoid disruptions to their jetty operations and keep silt away from their cooling seawater intake system. Due to the extensive reclamation required, some of the government regulations were ‘put to the test’ when we carried out the work. Early in the planning process, we made a major change to the shipping basins.

We removed the two basins and replaced it with a much bigger basin, namely Banyan Basin. The feedback was that the two basins could only cater for 20,000 to 40,000 DWT ships and would not be able to support a big logistics hub where ships up to 160,000 DWT ships would be docked. The head of this basin was also made larger so that ships in the basin could turn around to sail out of the basin.

More challenges with growing needs

More land was required that originally planned. Hence, to adjust to the revised project needs, we had to enlarge the original Jurong Island. This could be done if we would remove the two single buoy mooring3 (SBMs) in the Sinki Fairway. The presence of the two SBMs and the two pipe lines had a big impact on the sequencing of the reclamation works. Until the new replacement pipes were done, the existing ones could not be removed nor could we reclaim over the pipes without causing them to collapse. Because of the sequencing of work, it was to be expected that there would be sea current changes that could affect the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) access to the SBM and the forces that could be exerted on the ships themselves when hooked to the SBMs.

These SBMs were essentially floating platforms anchored by chains to the seabed, where the VLCC would couple to, for the SBM to discharge or load in crude oil. The circle of sea space at the SBM to allow the VLCC to swing around during its operation to line up with the tidal condition, took up a large amount of sea space.

We had to find equivalent replacement for the two SBMs that were required to be removed in order to enlarge Jurong Island. This replacement was in the form of two fixed berths. We designed these fixed berths to take in 320,000DWT VLCC, and these could possibly be the largest fixed berths in the world. Before the berths were put into operation, tests had to be carried out to see if the berths could take the big ships and to establish the operating procedure to berth and unberth the ships. With the new berths, berthing time could be as short as 20 to 30 minutes, compared to the few hours taken when the ships used the SBMs for its operation and also if the tide became adverse, the ships would have to detach themselves from the SBMs and return after the sea current conditions were more benign. These inconveniences do not happen at the fixed berths. Thus, we have greatly increased the efficiency of his type of operation with the fixed berths.

Linking Jurong Island to Mainland Singapore

When the decision was made to link up Jurong Island with the mainland by a causeway, three issues arising from the cut-off of the daily through flow of water, had to be tackled. Without the causeway, the through flow could better dissipate the heat coming from the hotwater cooling outfall structures, disperse the treated sewage discharge flowing into the channel and allow through passage for navigation. The causeway would therefore give rise to concerns.

In terms of navigation, this was not much of a problem as the ships could sail around the Jurong Island. In terms of heat dissipation, we had to identify the hot and cold water zones in the water around the island and minimise the short-circuiting of hot water into the cold water intake and locations where new
seawater cooling system could be located.

There were two treated sewage outfalls which discharge the treated effluent into the channel. The outfalls discharged the treated effluent at the level below the tidal range. The concern was that without the through flow, the effluent could stagnate in the channel, deteriorate and cause smell problem and other forms of pollution, as indicated by computer simulations. The solution would be either to divert the outfall pipes or to extend them further into the sea. However these would be very costly. In the end, we took the calculated chance that this smell problem might not occur because of the ship movements in the channel and we were proven right.

Customising to customers’ operations

To meet customers’ requirements, we have to make changes to the Jurong Island coastal profile, the existing infrastructure and private utility lines. As a result, the Jurong Island coastal profile had undergone several modifications to its present shape. The modifications included:

1. Making changes to accommodate more berths. The petrochemical industry needs a lot of berths for shipping activities. As we are short of waterfront to house all these berths, we had to create a recess on the southwestern side of Jurong Island so that more berths could be constructed using the perpendicular arrangement.

2. To meet Helios’4 needs by allowing more berths to be constructed within the basin, the southwestern corner of the coastline was modified into an ‘L shape’ to form a basin.

3. In forming this basin for Helios, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal water space needs were also taken into consideration, i.e. the safety distances from the LNG ships to the others.

4. The case of Universal Terminal5 (UT) was similar to that of Helios, except that it was more challenging to meet UT’s need. To accommodate all their vessels, we had to create a recess on the southern coastline. But this was not enough. There was a need to use the waterfront at the corner of the Banyan Basin. The sea current condition here was not suitable for berthing. A study was carried out and it was found that if we could trim off the top of the Serebut Reef somewhere to below the tidal level, the sea current at the entrance corner would be greatly improved for UT’s berthing operation.

Completion of Jurong Island

The reclamation of Jurong Island was completed in Sep 2009, some 20 years ahead of schedule. We spent S$7 billion. In return, we received fixed asset investments of S$30 billion. This is in addition to many other tangible and intangible benefits like job creation, diversifying Singapore’s energy source to LNG, a more vibrant industrial landscape, etc. This is a worthwhile engineering endeavour. But without the engineers and their vision, there would be no Jurong Island to begin with in the first place to secure the investments for the economic development of Singapore.

While the original plan for Jurong Island is completed, needs continue to grow and customised reclamation solutions have to be sought to meet the new challenges. All these will bring about higher engineering skills and hence, the engineering achievement will continue to grow and reach higher goals.