Standing on the Shore - Suddenly, a Slew of Gulf Coast Crude Loadings Onto VLCCs

There’s a reason why more than half a dozen midstream companies and joint ventures are clamoring to build deepwater loading terminals on the Gulf of Mexico: because it’s a major pain to load Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) any other way. These days, the standard operating procedure for loading the vast majority of VLCCs along the Gulf Coast involves a complex, time-consuming and costly process of ship-to-ship transfers called reverse-lightering, in which smaller tankers ferry out and transfer crude to VLCCs in specified lightering areas off the coast. Today, we ponder the current dynamics for U.S. crude exports via VLCC. 

For the first time ever, U.S. crude oil exports have hit the 3 MMb/d mark — a once-unthinkable pace equivalent to sending out 10 fully loaded Very Large Crude Carriers a week. VLCCs, with their 2-MMbbl capacity and rock-bottom per-bbl delivery costs, are the most cost-effective way to transport crude to distant markets like China and India. But there’s still only one terminal on the Gulf Coast that can fill a VLCC to the brim — the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port — and pipeline connections from key Texas and Oklahoma plays to LOOP are limited. Elsewhere along the coast, VLCCs need to be loaded in offshore deep water by reverse lightering from smaller vessels — a slower and more costly loading process. Change is a-comin’, though. Companies are testing the docking and partial loading of VLCCs at terminals along the Texas coast, and plans for a number of greenfield facilities capable of partially — or even fully — loading the gargantuan vessels at the dock are being considered. Today, we review the latest efforts to streamline the loading of VLCCs and what they mean for crude-export economics.

U.S. crude oil exports from Gulf Coast ports are soaring — in January they averaged well over 2 MMb/d — and when you’re moving large volumes long distances by water, there’s no vessel as efficient as a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC). A number of midstream companies are planning costly offshore terminals that could fully load 2-MMbbl VLCCs, but jobs like that take years, and Moda Midstream is in no mood to wait. Since it acquired Occidental Petroleum’s (Oxy) Ingleside marine terminal near Corpus Christi last September, Moda has been adding new tankage and loading equipment to enable it to load up to 1.25 MMbbl onto a VLCC within 24 hours from arrival to departure, then send the supertanker out to the deep waters of the Gulf for a quick top-off via reverse lightering. Upon completion of further expansion programs, the terminal’s loading capabilities will reach a combined 160 thousand barrels per hour (Mb/hour) among its three berths. Today, we discuss recent and near-term enhancements at Texas’s newest VLCC loading facility.