Belgian industrial logistics firm Katoen Natie on Tuesday began using a driverless truck to transport products within Exxon Mobil's premises in Singapore.

The autonomous truck, the first such truck ever used in Singapore, transports polymer resin products from a packaging facility to a warehouse 3 to 4 kilometers away at the oil company's manufacturing plant on Jurong Island.

The pilot truck, running at a maximum speed of 25 km per hour, will move about 250,000 tons of products annually, according to Katoen Natie. The company plans to increase the number of such trucks at the plant to 12 and eventually to 18 after the pilot project ends in three to six months.

The driverless truck uses signal-emitting transponders set up on its paths to navigate. But the logistics company hopes to switch to a more advanced GPS-based navigation system to enable such vehicles to ply public roads by 2020.

In his speech at the project's launch on Tuesday, Koen Cardon, CEO of Katoen Natie Singapore (Jurong), expressed hope that driverless trucks will help cope with labor shortages in the logistics sector.

"The chemical industry will see some very significant growth in the decade to come and finding the...drivers to handle these volumes will become a very big challenge for all of us," he said.

Cardon said his company is in talks with Singapore's Transport Ministry and other government agencies to expand the route for such trucks within Jurong Island, and ultimately to a port using public roads.

"This project is not (about) eliminating jobs but a means to upgrade the skills of operators," he said.