The changing US crude supply picture on the Gulf Coast region has already encouraged significant new infrastructure investment to bring crude to market by pipeline as well as logistics ingenuity to bring crude to market by rail. The net result will be over 3 MMb/d of new crude supply arriving at the Texas Gulf coast over the next two years. Some logistics companies are also betting that distributing all that crude to refineries will be a far from smooth process that they can benefit from. Today we begin a series looking at crude storage and blending facilities on the Gulf Coast.
This blog series will cover the construction or expansion of crude storage and blending facilities in the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast regions. First up we take a look at one of the biggest players – Enterprise and their Enterprise Crude Houston (ECHO) terminal in Harris County, east of Houston, TX.
Enterprise Product Partners LP (EPP) is the largest publicly traded MLP in the US. The company is a leading midstream asset owner deriving the majority of its revenue from transportation, processing and storage fees. As noted in our series on Mont Belvieu (see Can Mont Belvieu Handle the NGL Supply Surge Part I) Enterprise is one of the Big Four players in the Mont Belvieu natural gas liquid (NGL) market. Enterprise’s integrated midstream network is comprised of more than 5,200 miles of crude oil pipelines and storage terminals that feature nearly 12 million barrels of net capacity, including facilities at Cushing, OK (3.1 MMBbl) and Midland, TX (1.5 MMBbl).
During the first week of November 2012, EPP announced completion of Phase 1 of the ECHO storage terminal. The facility is receiving deliveries of crude oil and has 750 MBbl of storage capacity available. EPP plans to have expanded the terminal storage capacity by 900 MBbl in the first quarter of 2014. EPP say that when ECHO is complete it could have up to 6 MMBbl of crude oil storage capacity.
The ECHO terminal is strategically well placed in the Houston area. Two major pipelines are directly connected into the terminal. The first is the 350 Mb/d EPP owned Eagle Ford Crude pipeline that opened in July 2012 and runs between Lyssy, and Sealy, TX (see map below). The Lyssy terminal is connected to the Plains All American pipeline system at Three Rivers. That system delivers crude and condensate to Corpus Christi and is now a joint venture between Plains and EPP. The Sealy terminal on the Eagle Ford crude pipeline connects to the EPP Rancho pipeline that delivers crude into the Houston area terminating at ECHO. We covered the Eagle Ford crude takeaway infrastructure in more detail previously (see Knocking on Heaven’s Door Part II). The map shows the interconnection between the Eagle Ford EPP crude pipe assets (pink color), the Plains system (blue) and the ECHO terminal.
