blending services

Cushing doesn’t call itself the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World” for nothing. Pipelines with the capacity to handle one-third of total U.S. crude oil production flow into the central Oklahoma hub from a number of production areas, including the Alberta oil sands, the Bakken, the Rockies, the Permian and the nearby SCOOP/STACK. There’s almost as much pipeline capacity out of Cushing, with more than half of it bound for Texas’s Gulf Coast refineries and export docks and most of the rest headed for refineries in the Midcontinent and Midwest. Cushing’s inbound and outbound pipes connect to a staggering 94 million barrels of crude oil storage in about 350 aboveground tanks — each company’s set of tanks with its own unique degree of interconnectedness. Today, we continue our series on Cushing with a look at the large, medium and small pipelines that flow into the hub, and what they transport.

The crude oil hub at Cushing, OK, has more than 90 MMbbl of tankage, 3.7 MMb/d of incoming pipeline capacity and 3.1 MMb/d of outbound pipes. That’s an impressive amount of infrastructure by any standard. The real marvel of the place, though, is the variety of important roles it plays and services it provides for a wide range of market participants — producers, midstream companies, refiners and marketers, as well as producer/marketer and refiner/marketer hybrids. To truly understand Cushing — what it does and how it works — you need to know the hub’s assets and how they fit together. Today, we continue a series on the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World” with a look at the companies that own Cushing storage capacity and how that storage is put to use.