RBN Energy

Since last summer, the Corpus Christi area has emerged as the U.S.’s leading crude export venue. In the first five and a half months of 2020, it accounted for an astounding 45% of the barrels being shipped abroad — astounding because in the same period last year, the Corpus area held less than a 20% share. What is sometimes forgotten, though, is that little Ingleside, TX, located across Corpus Christi Bay from Corpus proper, is the area’s crude-export leader, with the Moda Midstream and Flint Hills Resources terminals responsible for just over half of Greater Corpus’s total export volumes. And, with the new South Texas Gateway Terminal nearing completion, Ingleside’s role will only increase in the coming months. Today, we conclude a series on Gulf Coast export terminals with a look at what has been going on in Ingleside.

Crude oil supply news comes in from all angles these days, bombarding the market daily with fresh information on producers’ efforts to ramp their volumes back up now that the global economic recovery is cautiously under way. Crude demand is rising, storage hasn’t burst at the seams yet, and prices have come a long, long way in just a few weeks. Permian exploration and production companies, having avoided a fleeting, longshot chance that the state of Texas might regulate West Texas oil production, are responding to higher crude oil prices as free-market participants should. The taps are quickly being turned back on, unleashing pent-up crude and associated gas volumes that, you could say, were under a sort of quarantine of their own for a while. Today, we provide an update on the status of curtailments in the Permian Basin.

In the first eight months of last year, the Corpus Christi area ranked third among its Gulf Coast brethren in crude oil export volumes — Houston was consistently #1 then, and Beaumont was the regular runner-up. Since September 2019, though, Corpus has been out front, often by a wide margin, and there’s good reason to believe it will stay ahead of the pack, at least for a while. What’s driving the South Texas port’s export-volume growth? First, there are three big new pipelines now moving crude from the Permian to Corpus: Cactus II, EPIC Crude and Gray Oak. Second, Corpus Christi and nearby Ingleside, TX, have a lot of existing storage and marine-dock capacity, and more is being developed. Today, we continue our review of crude export facilities with a look at three terminals along Corpus’s Inner Harbor.

Do not try and refine the Brent; that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no Brent. Then you will see it is not the Brent that gets refined; it is only yourself. For those who are not fans of The Matrix, that sentence may seem a little cryptic, but it makes a point that is little understood outside the rarified world of crude oil trading. The production of North Sea Brent crude oil is down to less than a couple of hundred barrels per day. Soon it will be gone altogether. But 70% of all crude oil in the world is tied either directly or indirectly to the price of Brent. How is that possible? Well, it’s because Brent is no longer simply a grade of crude oil. Over the past two decades, it has evolved into an intricate, multi-layered matrix of trading instruments, pricing benchmarks and standard contracts that is a world unto itself. A world with a huge impact across almost everything in today’s energy markets. Unfortunately, no one can be told what Brent is. You have to see it for yourself. So that’s where we’ll go in this blog series. Warning: To read on is like taking the red pill.

Through the second half of the 2010s, the Permian Basin’s crude oil supply trajectory was clear: up, up and up. From the start of 2015 to the end of last year, crude production in the world’s leading shale play increased by an amazing 3 MMb/d, from 1.7 MMb/d to 4.7 MMb/d. Three new pipelines with a combined capacity of more than 2 MMb/d were built to move a lot of those incremental barrels to Corpus Christi, which — thanks in part to newly developed storage and docks — has become the U.S.’s #1 port for crude exports in recent months. But Permian producers have trimmed their crude output by at least several hundred thousand barrels a day this spring in response to falling demand and low prices. Has the Permian been thrown off course, and if it has, what would that mean for marine terminals in Corpus? Today, we continue our series of Gulf Coast crude export facilities with a look at the three newest terminals along the Corpus Christi Ship Channel.

Very Large Crude Carriers offer economies of scale and are the oil transporters of choice for shippers moving massive volumes of crude from the U.S. Gulf Coast to distant customers in Europe and Asia. VLCCs also can serve as cost-effective floating storage — in the current contango market, a growing number of these 2-MMbbl behemoths are being used to stockpile crude until its value increases in the coming months. VLCCs can be loaded to the gills through reverse lightering at a number of deepwater points off the coast of Texas, but only one facility, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, can fill the supertankers to the brim at the port itself. LOOP also can receive fully loaded VLCCs, of course, and another ace up its sleeve is its 72 MMbbl of cavern and tank storage a few miles inland at Clovelly, LA. Today, we continue our series on Gulf Coast export facilities with a look at LOOP.

U.S. refinery demand for crude oil is off sharply due to COVID-related impacts on automobile and jet travel, and crude production is being slashed. Crude storage is filling up fast, both on land and on tankers at sea, and may be maxed out by June. That leaves imports and exports as the market-balancing agents, at least until demand for motor gasoline and jet fuel starts to rebound. And with significant volumes of imported heavy and medium crudes still needed by complex refineries, exports are likely to rise from their current, near-record levels this spring and summer. Longer term, though, we expect export volumes to decline, setting up a battle for barrels among export terminals. Today, we continue our series on Gulf Coast crude export terminals with a look at the three facilities in the Beaumont/Nederland area.