Augustus Pipeline

Plains All American has an extraordinary collection of crude oil gathering systems and shuttle pipelines in the Permian Basin, as well as full or partial ownership interest in a number of long-haul takeaway pipelines to the Gulf Coast and the Cushing hub. As important as many of these individual systems and pipelines may be, it’s the interconnectivity among these assets — and especially Plains’ crude oil terminals in Midland and other West Texas locales — that gives the midstream giant’s Permian infrastructure a value far greater than the sum of its parts. Today, we’ll discuss the important role that Plains’ two terminals in Crane, TX, play in balancing the midstream company’s Permian crude oil delivery network and providing destination optionality.

The new, large-diameter crude oil pipelines coming online between the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast grab all the headlines. They wouldn’t be nearly as valuable to producers, however, if it weren’t for a number of other, smaller projects being developed in West Texas to transport large volumes of crude from major gathering systems and storage hubs to these new takeaway pipelines. A case in point is Lotus Midstream’s recently unveiled Augustus Pipeline project, which will use a combination of new and existing pipe to initially transport up to 150 Mb/d of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), West Texas Light (WTL) and West Texas Sour (WTS) from Midland to Crane. When Augustus starts flowing late this year, crude delivered to the Crane hub could flow into the Longhorn Pipeline to Houston, or maybe the EPIC Crude or Gray Oak pipelines to Corpus Christi. Today, we discuss Lotus’s planned Midland-to-Crane project, and its significance for Midland Basin producers and the pipe’s owner/developer.