U.S. crude oil exports averaged 2.8 MMb/d last week, a decrease of 554 Mb/d from the prior week and the lowest rate since early November. The decrease was largely driven by the third consecutive decline in volumes exported out of Houston-area terminals, which fell by an estimated 450 Mb/d to an eight-week low of 757 Mb/d. The four-week moving average (red-dashed line) is now 3.6 MMb/d, down about 300 Mb/d from the previous week.
Featured Articles
- Analyst Insight
Corpus Christi Drives Weekly U.S. Crude Export Rebound
U.S. crude oil loadings averaged 3.7 MMb/d last week, an increase of 680 Mb/d from the previous week.
- Blog
One Week - A Record Seven Days for Gulf Coast Crude Exports, and a Lot More
The level of activity at crude oil export terminals from Corpus Christi to the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) is nothing short of extraordinary — a record 4.8 MMb/d was loaded the week ended August 25, according to RBN’s Crude Voyager report, and Houston-area terminals loaded an all-time high of 1.4 MMb/d. But there’s a lot more to the crude exports story. When you live this stuff day-in, day-out, you see subtle changes that often extend into trends and, if you’re lucky, you sometimes get signals that things you’d been predicting are actually happening. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss highlights from the latest Crude Voyager and what the weekly report’s data and analysis reveal about the global oil market.
- Blog
Let It Go - Will New Crude Export Terminals Be 'Frozen' in Favor of Expansions?
In our blogs and at our 2019 School of Energy a couple of weeks ago, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs and pros and cons of a multitude of proposed crude oil export terminals. What we’ve come to believe is that, with U.S. production growth appearing to slow and market players fearful of overbuilding, many of these multibillion-dollar greenfield projects are unlikely to advance to financing and construction. Odds are that the midstream sector instead will focus on ways to add new capacity to existing terminals, even if that means still relying on reverse lightering in the Gulf of Mexico to fully load Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs). In today’s blog, we discuss why producers, traders and midstreamers alike may be pulling back from investments in big, expensive export projects, and what it could mean down the road.
