Enterprise Expands Texas Western Products System With Fourth Terminal

Refined product markets in the U.S. are constantly morphing. Over time, demand for gasoline and diesel rises or falls, refineries are shut down, and the price spread between products sold in neighboring regions widens or narrows. These changes can incentivize refiners and marketers to push into new areas — and encourage midstream companies to develop pipeline capacity to ease the flow of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel into newly attractive markets. Midstreamers have advanced a number of pipeline projects in the past few months to help move increasing volumes of products west across Texas to the Permian, the Great Plains and into the Rockies. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss these projects and what’s been driving their development.

Refinery closures. Shifting demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Yawning price differentials for refined products in neighboring regions. These and other factors have spurred an ongoing reworking of the extensive U.S. products pipeline network, which transports the fuels needed to power cars, SUVs, trucks, trains and airplanes — not to mention pumps in the oil patch, tractors and lawnmowers. New products pipelines are being built and existing pipelines are being repurposed, expanded or made bidirectional, typically to take advantage of opportunities that midstreamers, refiners and marketers see opening up. In today’s RBN blog, we begin a review of major pipelines that batch gasoline, diesel and jet fuel and look at the subtle and not-so-subtle changes being made to the U.S. refined products distribution network.

Mexico’s consumption of motor fuels is rising, its production of gasoline and diesel continues to fall, and U.S. refineries and midstream companies are racing to fill the widening gap. The export volumes are impressive: deliveries of finished motor gasoline from the U.S. to Mexico averaged 328 Mb/d in the third quarter of 2016, up 41% from the same period last year, and exports of low-sulfur diesel were up 29% to 194 Mb/d. And there’s good reason to believe that U.S.-to-Mexico volumes will keep growing. Today we look at recent trends in gasoline and diesel production and consumption south of the border, and at ongoing efforts to enable more U.S.-sourced gasoline and diesel to reach key Mexican markets by rail and pipeline.