Greetings From Nashville – Nashville’s Growth Boom Could Have a Big Impact on Regional Fuel Supply

Nashville is best known for its country music, but it’s also a fast‑growing gasoline and diesel market, uniquely positioned between the Gulf Coast and the Midwest. As the city rolls out massive plans for development — including an expanded entertainment complex and a new NFL stadium — space is getting tight along the Cumberland River, where several fuel terminals cluster. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at how Nashville’s rapid growth could reshuffle product flows and what that means for refiners, marketers and shippers.

Nashville has no refineries of its own but serves as a terminal and distribution hub for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel across Middle Tennessee — the state’s middle third — and into neighboring states, allowing it to play an outsized role in the regional refined products market. The 2.5‑MMb/d, 5,500-mile Colonial Pipeline system, in service since 1963, runs from Houston to Linden, NJ (just outside New York City), and has many stub lines that branch out to supply cities that aren’t on the main route. Nashville depends on those stub lines to move barrels from Gulf Coast refineries into Middle Tennessee, while Colonial’s mainlines continue on to serve Southeast and Mid‑Atlantic markets.

There are three Colonial stubs that extend northwest from the main pipeline’s Atlanta junction in northwestern Georgia to Chattanooga. From there, two parallel stub lines — one carrying only gasoline and the other batching diesel and jet fuel (blue lines in Figure 1 below) — extend northwest to Nashville, while the third (not shown) runs northeast to Knoxville. Nashville’s 10 large refined product terminals are primarily supplied by Colonial’s stub and spur lines. (In its documents, Colonial defines “stub lines” as those extending from the main line, while “spur lines” are for local delivery off the system.)