Among the ten infrastructure projects I've overseen, the Juhi 2 Aviation Facility in Lagos stands apart from the others. The other nine were petroleum storage — tank farms and depots handling fuel for the broader downstream market. Juhi 2 was an aviation fuel facility, and the difference is not cosmetic. The fundamentals of tank construction carry over, but almost everything else about how the facility is engineered, tested, and operated changes.
Anyone assuming aviation fuel storage is "the same thing, just for planes" is underestimating what that distinction actually requires.
Contamination control becomes the central design problem
Petroleum storage for general downstream distribution has to control contamination — water ingress, sediment, cross-contamination between products — but there's some tolerance built into the system, because the fuel passes through further refinement and quality checks downstream before reaching an end consumer.
Aviation fuel has essentially none of that buffer. Jet fuel contamination is a direct flight-safety issue, not a quality inconvenience, and the facility design has to treat it that way from the first drawing. Filtration, water separation, and sampling protocols are far more rigorous, and the margin for error in tank lining, seal integrity, and piping material selection shrinks considerably compared to general petroleum storage.
Tolerances tighten across the entire facility
This shows up in places that aren't obvious until you've actually built both kinds of facilities. Pipe and valve material specifications are stricter. Tank coating systems need to meet aviation fuel compatibility standards specifically, not just general petroleum compatibility. Even housekeeping standards during construction — keeping the work area free of debris that could end up inside a tank — get treated with more discipline, because the consequence of a contamination event is categorically more serious.
Regulatory and testing rigor is a different category
Both petroleum storage and aviation fuel facilities go through commissioning and regulatory sign-off, but the testing protocol for aviation fuel is considerably more exhaustive — additional sampling stages, additional documentation, and typically additional oversight from aviation-specific regulatory and quality bodies beyond what a standard depot commissioning requires.
None of this means aviation fuel facilities are harder to build in a construction sense. The civil and structural work is comparable to any tank farm. What's different is the discipline required around everything that touches fuel quality, and a delivery team that treats an aviation facility like "a depot with an extra checklist" is setting itself up for problems during commissioning, not during construction.
What this means for delivery teams
- Specify aviation-grade materials and coatings from the start — retrofitting for aviation compliance after building to general petroleum standard is far more expensive than designing for it from day one.
- Build contamination control into the construction process itself, not just the final commissioning tests.
- Budget more time for testing and sign-off than a comparable petroleum storage project would require — the additional rigor is not optional and should be reflected in the schedule from the outset.
Having delivered both types of facilities, I'd say the biggest risk on an aviation fuel project isn't technical capability — it's underestimating how much more exacting every stage needs to be, simply because the consequences of getting it wrong sit in a different category entirely.