A low-profile tycoon, who shuns the media spotlight, may hold the key to our fuel security.

In the debate over a strategic fuel reserve, one that the government should have built up long before the latest Middle East tensions, the familiar refrain resurfaced: the country simply lacks adequate storage facilities.

That claim, it turns out, is not entirely accurate, according to Nosy Tarsee. Buried within the real estate and leasing portfolio of one major diversified conglomerate sits a fully operational downstream energy asset: a multi-product fuel terminal complete with a tank farm holding nearly 90 million liters of diesel and gasoline, plus a dedicated ethanol and blend-component storage facility.

The facility includes its own jetty for seaborne receipt, truck-loading racks, mooring buoys, fire protection systems, and pre-inspection yards — everything required to receive, store, and dispatch oil products smoothly.

Yet in the group’s reporting, the entire operation is folded quietly into the broader “commercial real estate” segment, treated less like a strategic energy play and more like just another leased asset generating rental income.

The numbers are respectable on their own terms. That division continues to deliver steady revenue growth, healthy earnings before income tax, depreciation and Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization margins, and rising net income, helped in part by the recent restart of the very tanks that underwent preventive maintenance.

Storage-tank book value sits in the low hundreds of millions, a modest line item inside a much larger property-and-equipment item.

In ordinary times, such an asset would register as little more than a footnote, but in the middle of a supply-shock episode, when emergency diesel cargoes are arriving, and buffer stocks are critical policy issues, it becomes something else entirely: a physical optionality disguised as bricks and mortar.

A bottleneck-busting piece of infrastructure that turns imported molecules into domestic continuity without the drama of refining margins or retail price wars.

The broader point is hard to ignore. While the nation debates building new storage facilities from scratch, one conglomerate already owns a ready-made piece of it, quietly, profitably and strategically located in a former military zone.

In times of crisis, the most valuable energy assets are often the ones the market has been trained not to see.