SINGAPORE - A fire that had broken out at an oil storage tank at Tankstore's Pulau Busing terminal in Singapore on Tuesday evening has been extinguished, the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said on Wednesday.

"After approximately 6 hours of intense firefighting operations, the raging oil storage tank fire was extinguished," the SCDF said on its Facebook page.

The cause of the fire is not yet known and is under investigation, an SCDF spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday.

Thirty-one firefighting and support vehicles and 128 SCDF personnel were involved in the operations, said the SCDF, adding that it had been alerted to the fire at about 5:50 p.m. on Tuesday.

Singapore-based Tankstore operates the terminal on Pulau Busing, an island off Singapore's southwest coast. It has a total capacity of 2 million cubic metres, or 112 tanks, to store petroleum and petrochemical products, according to the company's website.

The fire-struck storage tank was said to have contained fuel oil, according to a Tankstore employee who declined to be identified as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

A by-product of the crude oil refining process, fuel oil is used as a shipping fuel and in power generation.

The fire is not expected to have any material impact on fuel oil trading and supply in Singapore, a global trading hub of the fuel, two Singapore-based fuel oil traders said. (Reporting by Masayuki Kitano, Jessica Jaganathan and Roslan Khasawneh; Editing by Susan Fenton and Amrutha Gayathri)

© Reuters News 2018