Move It On Over, Part 3 - Refined Product Price Spreads Spur Pipeline Projects in PADDs 2, 3 and 4

Refinery closures. Shifting demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Yawning price differentials for refined products in neighboring regions. These and other factors have spurred an ongoing reworking of the extensive U.S. products pipeline network, which transports the fuels needed to power cars, SUVs, trucks, trains and airplanes — not to mention pumps in the oil patch, tractors and lawnmowers. New products pipelines are being built and existing pipelines are being repurposed, expanded or made bidirectional, typically to take advantage of opportunities that midstreamers, refiners and marketers see opening up. In today’s RBN blog, we begin a review of major pipelines that batch gasoline, diesel and jet fuel and look at the subtle and not-so-subtle changes being made to the U.S. refined products distribution network.

Since the century turned, there’s been a big buildup in refining capacity in the U.S. Midwest, primarily to process the increasing volumes of heavy sour crude being piped in from Western Canada. Over the same period, refining capacity in the Mid-Atlantic region has declined by more than half, mostly for economic reasons — including the lack of pipeline access to favorably priced U.S. shale oil — but also due to events, such as the devastating June 2019 fire at Philadelphia Energy Solutions’ 330-Mb/d refinery in Philadelphia, which led the facility’s owner to shut it down. In addition to spurring more refined product imports to the Mid-Atlantic and increased flows to the region on Colonial Pipeline, the changing market dynamics prompted a push to increase pipeline flows of gasoline and diesel east from the Midwest to markets in Pennsylvania and beyond. In today’s RBN blog, we continue a review of the U.S.’s still-morphing refined product pipeline networks with a look at recently added capacity from PADD 2 to PADD 1.

The East Coast consumes more than 200 million gallons of gasoline, diesel, heating oil and jet fuel a day, but produces only one-fifth of that total, most of it at New Jersey and Pennsylvania refineries. To keep the region’s cars, trucks, trains and airplanes moving (and many of its homes and businesses heated) huge volumes of fuels need to be delivered from elsewhere, mostly via two pipelines from the Gulf Coast and the rest by ship—some from Gulf and other U.S. ports and some from overseas. Today, we continue our examination of the infrastructure that moves gasoline, diesel, heating oil and jet fuel to the nation’s largest fuel-consuming region with a look at four major pipelines.