Houston Chronicle by Sergio Chapa 2/1/2019
The race is on.
Record crude oil production has three of North America’s biggest pipeline companies competing to build offshore oil loading terminals in the Gulf of Mexico just south of Brazoria County, where they hope to receive some of the largest tankers in the world and tap into a rapidly growing export market worth billions of dollars..
The Houston company Enterprise Products Partners and a joint venture that includes the Canadian pipeline company Enbridge and Houston’s Kinder Morgan have filed permit applications for competing export terminals. Under federal law, the application will be reviewed in 356 days. In the meantime, Enterprise and Enbridge will try to line up customers to support for their respective projects.
Supertanker craze
The Permian Basin of West Texas and other shale plays have boosted U.S. crude oil production to a record 11.9 million barrels of day while exports have risen to more than 2 million barrels per day, according to the Energy Department. Most of those exports are heading to Europe and Asia where refineries are turning U.S. light crude into gasoline, diesel, plastics and other products.
Capable of carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil in a single load, Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs are emerging as the tanker of choice to feed those refineries, but U.S. ports are too shallow to handle them. A fully loaded VLCC tanker requires 66 feet of water and ship channels in Texas and elsewhere are typically between 40 to 45 feet deep.
Some companies partially load VLCC tankers at their docks and use a second tanker to load the rest of the shipment in the deeper water of the Gulf of Mexico — a process that can take anywhere from two days to a week or even longer depending on the weather and other conditions. But Enterprise and Enbridge believe that building export terminals offshore is a cost-effective, time-saving solution.
Enterprise Products Partners announced plans to build the Sea Port Oil Terminal, or SPOT, in July. The company’s proposed export terminal would sit in 115 feet of water about 31 miles offshore. Capable of loading 85,000 barrels of crude oil per hour, Enterprise estimates that terminal operators will be able to fully load a VLCC tankers in 24 hours.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Deepwater-Rivalry-Competing-offshore-crude-oil-13580640.php
