Mississippi River

Infrastructure constraints in the energy sector come in all shapes and sizes, and don’t think for a second that they only involve pipelines. For many producers of crude oil, refined products and other liquids, the Mississippi River is a critically important conduit for barging commodities to market. Lately though, water levels on sections of the river have been near historic lows, reducing both the volume of liquids that each barge can carry and the number of barges the Mississippi can handle. Among other things, the low water situation has been putting a squeeze on condensate producers in the “wet” Marcellus/Utica, who depend on barges to transport a significant portion of their superlight crude oil down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to refineries and for blending into Light Louisiana Sweet (LLS). In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the situation.

Data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that inland barge movements between the U.S. Midwest and the Gulf Coast increased 10 fold between January 2011 and October 2013 to nearly 160 Mb/d in response to soaring crude production and pipeline congestion. Since then barge traffic on the Mississippi River (the main waterway between the two regions) plunged 80% to 27 Mb/d in April 2015 – the latest month reported. Today we explain why.

As much as 240 Mb/d of light sweet crude from North Dakota is currently being shipped from the Bakken to St. James LA in what has become a pipeline on wheels. More crude is also moving to the Gulf Coast from Western Canada by rail and new destination terminals are being developed along the Mississippi River. But increased pipeline capacity to the Gulf Coast is a growing competitive threat to these rail destinations. Today we survey rail destination terminals East of the Mississippi.