Midland may be the king of crude oil hubs in the Permian, with its immense storage capacity and robust trading activity, but the hub in Crane, TX, is at least a prince — and a particularly interesting one at that. In addition to its 7 MMbbl of tankage for storing, staging, and blending crude (and another 1 MMbbl on the way), Crane offers a slew of inbound pipelines from both the Delaware and Midland basin, plus links to and from the Midland hub and a number of outbound pipelines to both the Corpus Christi and Houston markets. Just as important to know about, are the various intra-hub connections among Crane’s 10 terminals, because they reveal how you can get crude to pretty much wherever you need it to be. Today, we continue a series on crude storage in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
As we said in Part 1, storage and distribution hubs play important and often underappreciated roles, both in helping to choreograph the transport of crude oil from the lease to end-users and in enabling traders and others to take advantage of commercial opportunities. This is especially true in the Permian, the U.S.’s leading oil-producing region, where multiple hubs have developed over the past few years to keep pace with production growth and pipeline build-outs. We also questioned the widely held view that the sudden fall-off in Permian production last year and the current expectation for only modest production growth in 2021 and beyond has left the region overbuilt from a midstream infrastructure perspective. In fact, while the Permian generally has sufficient takeaway capacity, there has been recent evidence of tightness in the Permian storage market. To understand why and where such issues may develop, today, we begin our hub-by-hub review, starting with the one in Crane, TX.
To truly understand Cushing — what it does and how it works — you need to know the hub’s assets and how they fit together. RBN’s Cushing Crude Oil Playbook provides the first one-stop, comprehensive guide to the hub’s assets.
One hundred years ago there were a dozen sprawling ranches and more than 20,000 cattle and sheep in Crane County (just south of Odessa), but only 37 people and a couple of newly built roads. Everything changed in 1926 with a major oil discovery by Church & Fields Exploration Co. By the following year, Crane County’s population had soared to 6,000 and the county was the leading oil producer in all of Texas, with production of more than 12 Mb/d — two barrels a day for every man, woman, and child. Fast-forward to 2021: the county’s population is down a bit, but crude oil production is up, averaging about 20 Mb/d, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, ranking Crane around 30th among the state’s counties in that regard. Crane County — or more specifically, the county seat in Crane, TX — isn’t known as much for crude oil production lately, though, as it is for its oil storage and distribution hub.
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About the song
"Wide Open Spaces" was written by Susan Gibson. It appears as the second song on side one of The Dixie Chicks’s (now called The Chicks) fourth studio album of the same name. Released as the third single from the LP in August 1998, the song went to #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and #41 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart. The song won the Country Music Association's award for Single of the Year and Music Video of the Year in 1999. Personnel on the record were: Natalie Maines (vocals), Emily Erwin (acoustic guitar, banjo, dobro, vocals), Martie Seidel (fiddle, mandolin, vocals), and various session musicians.
The album Wide Open Spaces was recorded between March and August 1997, with Blake Chancey and Paul Worley producing. Released in January 1998, it went to #1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and #4 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. It won two Grammy Awards in 1999, has been certified 13x Platinum, and given Diamond status by the Recording Industry Association of America. Five singles were released from the LP.
The Chicks (previously known as The Dixie Chicks) are an American country music group formed in Dallas in 1989 by sisters Martie and Emily Erwin. Martie (now Martie Maguire) and Emily (now Emily Strayer) brought Natalie Maines into the band as the lead singer in 1995. In June 2020, the band changed its name to The Chicks. They have released eight studio albums, two live albums, and 25 singles, and have sold more than 33 million records worldwide. Five members have passed through the ranks of The Chicks since their formation. They continue to record and tour.
