It is disheartening to see even the streets turn into holding pens for people queuing for rationed fuel. This scarcity lays bare the country’s condition. Yet the issue is not which foreign power fancies our assets—be it India, China, the United States or the UAE. They arrive with their own terms, intent on extracting value, while we stand by not as negotiators of worth, but as desperate custodians of a squandered inheritance we scarcely comprehend. The scandal is not that others covet what we possess. The scandal is that we never prized it ourselves until we were reduced to queues, coupons and quiet indignity.
Consider Trincomalee, a natural harbour spoken of in naval history with something approaching reverence. Within it lies the oil tank farm, one of the most strategically placed energy reserves in South Asia. There are 99 tanks, or more precisely 101—there is no number 99, and the 101st was never completed. Even the numbering reeks of interruption and neglect. One tank, the 91st, was obliterated during the Second World War by a kamikaze-style strike from Imperial Japanese Navy Zero aircraft. That alone should dispel any illusion about its insignificance. It was not struck by chance. It was struck because it mattered.
And yet, what have we done with it since?
Two tiers of tanks dominate the site. The upper tank farm, set along the hillside of the Trincomalee–Kinniya road, comprises 61 tanks. Today, 51 of them lie unused. Not shattered, not irreparable—merely abandoned. They sit idle, corroding into mute relics of a forsaken ambition. Under the recent joint venture between Sri Lanka and India, via Lanka IOC and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, this section falls under Trincomalee Petroleum Terminals Ltd. Strip away the polite phrasing and the reality is blunt: these tanks demand wholesale rehabilitation. Pipelines are antiquated. Pumping systems are obsolete or defunct. The neglect is so severe that reviving them is estimated to cost roughly 500 million US dollars. Half a billion dollars simply to reclaim what is already ours.
Even here, we are not leading the effort. External actors circle with predatory patience. India is already embedded. The UAE has shown interest. Others will inevitably follow. Not out of charity, but calculation. They see opportunity where we see inconvenience. They bring capital, certainly, but also conditions, influence and long-term leverage. We bargain from a position of weakness because we have allowed ourselves to decay into one.
Now consider the lower tank farm, stretching towards the sea along the same road. Here the insult becomes unmistakable. Twenty-four tanks fall under the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and fourteen under Lanka IOC. The IOC tanks are operational. They function. They generate revenue. Meanwhile, CPC’s tanks—our tanks—remain largely empty. Empty in a country where citizens queue for hours to secure a few litres of fuel. Empty in a nation crippled by energy imports. Empty in a state that pleads poverty while sitting atop dormant capacity.
Then comes the detail that ought to provoke outrage in anyone with a shred of national self-respect. Three CPC tanks have been leased to Prima Flour Mill Ltd to store water for emergency firefighting. The rent is one hundred rupees per tank per month. Not per day—per month. This is not mere incompetence; it borders on absurdity. A strategic asset, engineered to world-class standards, leased for a sum that would scarcely purchase a single litre of petrol today.
We are not merely haemorrhaging money. We are forfeiting judgement.
These tanks were constructed in the 1930s using high-grade Manchester steel, with plates riveted together by hand—a method demanding precision, discipline and foresight. The structural integrity, the thickness of the steel, the design itself—nearly a century on, much of it remains intact. Each tank holds approximately 19,000 metric tonnes, or 19 million litres. Multiply that across even a portion of the total capacity and the scale of squander becomes difficult to ignore.
This was not accidental infrastructure. It was deliberate and strategic. The British did not build it out of benevolence. They built it because they understood Trincomalee’s value as a refuelling and logistical hub in the Indian Ocean. They planned decades ahead. We, by contrast, have struggled to think beyond the next election.
Even now, the underlying engineering remains sound. What is absent is not capacity, but resolve. The upper tank farm requires modern pipelines and functioning transfer systems. This is a technical task, not an insurmountable one. Countries with fewer resources have built entire energy networks in less time. We are not starting from nothing. We are starting from latent strength, yet behaving as though we are bereft of both means and imagination.
So the discourse shifts. We ask who will invest, who will partner, who will take control. The language itself betrays capitulation. We do not ask how to marshal our own resources, reform our institutions or prioritise our assets. Instead, we wait for outsiders to assign value to what we have neglected. When they do, we cry exploitation, as though we were coerced into this predicament.
But exploitation requires consent, and ours has been cultivated through years of indifference.
The fuel queues are not merely an economic symptom. They are a visible indictment of structural failure. While citizens wait hours for petrol, tens of millions of litres of storage capacity lie unused in Trincomalee. While the country struggles for foreign exchange to import fuel, it sits on infrastructure capable of making it a regional storage and distribution hub. While policymakers speak loftily of energy security, they disregard one of the most consequential assets within their control.
This is not just about oil tanks. It is about a habit of undervaluing national assets until they are sold, leased or lost. It is about governance that reacts rather than anticipates. It is about the quiet acceptance of dysfunction, where absurdities—like leasing vast storage tanks for a pittance—pass without consequence.
Now, as foreign interest intensifies, the familiar dilemma returns. Do we retain control and invest heavily to restore and operate the facility ourselves, or do we enter joint ventures that bring capital while diluting sovereignty? That decision should have been made years ago, when the cost of neglect was still manageable. Today, the price is steeper—not only financially, but strategically.
The tragedy of the Trincomalee Oil Tank Farm is not that it cannot be revived. It can. The engineering endures. The location remains unrivalled. Demand for energy storage in the region is rising. The real loss is that revival now depends more on others than on ourselves.
And that is the true forfeiture. Not the tanks, not the money, but the agency.
A nation that inherited one of the finest energy infrastructures in the region now haggles over how much of it to relinquish just to endure the present. The queues will fade. Fuel will flow again. But unless the underlying mindset shifts, Trincomalee will not be an exception. It will be a pattern, repeated with other assets, ending in the same quiet surrender.
We were not stripped of our potential. We relinquished it—gradually, carelessly, and without recognising its worth until it was already slipping from our grasp.
