Lake Charles

The eight-year legal clash over the coveted CITGO refinery assets just took another unexpected turn, leaving the potential sale up in the air. The winner of the auction for CITGO’s three large U.S. refineries, related pipelines and terminal assets remains uncertain as the auction faces additional legal hurdles. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll dive into the latest in the court case and what it could mean for the three refineries involved, which have a combined capacity of more than 800 Mb/d.

The bitter, eight-year battle to control CITGO Petroleum’s three U.S. refineries could soon be coming to an end. A Delaware court has recommended a $7.38 billion bid from Dalinar Energy Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of Canadian miner Gold Reserve Ltd. There’s opposition, but a final decision could be just weeks away. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss what a resolution would mean for the three refineries, which have a combined capacity of more than 800 Mb/d. 

It now seems likely that Elliott Investment Management’s Amber Energy will acquire CITGO Petroleum for $7.3 billion in mid-2025, thereby ending a yearslong legal drama about the fate of CITGO’s three large U.S. refineries and related pipelines and terminal assets. So what exactly is Amber buying and how will the refineries in question fare in the increasingly competitive global market for refined fuels? In today’s RBN blog, we’ll summarize the long legal battle that led to Amber’s selection by a federal court’s “special master” as the preferred buyer, examine the assets to be acquired, and assess what’s ahead for CITGO’s refineries, which have a combined capacity of more than 800 Mb/d.

Pipelines delivering crude to Houston from the South Texas Eagle Ford are estimated to be half empty. Yet over 200Mb/d of crude is shipped from that basin to refineries in Houston and further east along the Gulf Coast by barge. One of the key reasons appears to be that local traffic congestion and a lack of adequate throughway pipeline capacity past Houston pushes barrels not needed locally onto the water to reach refineries in Louisiana. Today we explain the Houston crude traffic problem.

Waterborne crude shipments out of the Port of Corpus Christi are still growing this year – averaging 700 Mb/d as of May 2015. A veritable armada of barges and tankers has converged on South Texas to help move all that crude. A large part of the shipments are on small inland tank barges plying the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) - a 65 years old canal system that forms a vital backbone for Gulf Coast refiners. Today we describe the changing profile of barge shipments along the Gulf of Mexico.