It’s relatively common along the U.S. Gulf Coast to use underground salt domes to store crude oil, natural gas, mixed NGLs and so-called NGL “purity products” like ethane and propane. There are also a handful of salt cavern storage facilities in Kansas, Michigan, New York and Virginia. But in the Rockies and the West Coast states they’re rare as hen’s teeth, one of the few examples being Sawtooth Caverns, a one-of-a-kind facility in Utah that not only stores propane and butanes but also gasoline and diesel. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss Sawtooth Caverns and its increasing role in the sprawling region’s NGL and refined products markets.
We’ve been interested in salt dome storage for many years. In one of our first blogs (Smoky and the Salt Caverns back in 2012), we wrote about the legendary Gaines H. “Smokey” Billue — a character if there ever was one, weighing in at over 300 pounds, a ponytail under his sombrero, a bright-colored shirt, a Colt .45 in his belt and a Bowie knife tied to his red-and-white cowboy boots. Back in the early 1950s, Smokey came up with the idea of creating domes within massive salt formations and using them to store NGLs and other hydrocarbons. Over the years, we’ve written many blogs about salt cavern storage, especially regarding NGL storage at the Mont Belvieu, TX, fractionation and storage hub; crude oil at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) sites in Texas and Louisiana; and the increasing number of natural gas caverns along the Gulf Coast.
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.
But as we hinted at in the introduction to today’s blog, Sawtooth Caverns — like Smokey Billue — is in a category of its own, not only because it’s the largest of the very few salt dome storage facilities in either PADD 4 (Rockies) or PADD 5 (West Coast) but also because it’s been branching out from NGL storage to include gasoline and diesel — something that's relatively common in Europe but a rare sight indeed in North America. By doing so, Sawtooth Caverns is helping to smooth out the refined products markets in both PADDs.
So, what is Sawtooth Caverns, what does it have and what does it do? Sawtooth Caverns LLC, the facility’s owner and operator, is a 50-50 joint venture (JV) of commodities trading giant Trafigura and Haddington Ventures, a private equity investor in conventional and renewable energy projects. The Sawtooth Caverns storage facility in Delta, UT — about 130 miles south/southwest of Salt Lake City — was initially developed in the mid-2010s by Magnum Development, a former portfolio company of Haddington Ventures that is now a subsidiary of Chevron. (Chevron owns a salt dome storage facility for natural gas in Delta very near Sawtooth Caverns. More on that later.)
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About the song
“Only One” was written by Kanye West, Paul McCartney, Noah Goldstein, Mike Dean and Kirby Lauryen. It is a tribute to West’s daughter, North, and is sung from the perspective of his late mother, Donda West. It was recorded in Mexico in September 2014 when West, McCartney and other artists recorded nine songs. It was produced by songwriters West, McCartney and Goldstein. Released as a stand-alone single in December 2014, it went to #11 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and #35 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart. It has been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. Personnel on the record were: Kanye West (vocals) and Paul McCartney (Fender Rhodes electric piano).
Kanye West (now known as “Ye”) is an American hip-hop rapper, songwriter and record producer. One of the most prominent figures in hip-hop, West got his start producing artists in the Chicago area in the early 2000s. His debut studio album, The College Dropout, came out in 2004 and sold more than 4 million copies. He has released 10 studio albums, two live albums, one compilation album and 54 singles and has sold more than 160 million records worldwide. West has won three American Music Awards, 18 Billboard Music Awards, 24 Grammy Awards and five MTV Video Music Awards, He continues to record and tour. During a recent concert in China in September, he announced his next LP will be called Bully and performed a track, “Beauty and the Beast,” from the upcoming album.
