Southern Access

The Enbridge crude oil network is North America’s largest. Its original objective was to deliver western Canadian crude to refineries in the US Midwest. Many of those refineries like the 413 Mb/d BP Whiting complex south of Chicago have spent billions upgrading to process heavy Canadian crude. But the shale boom is adding significant volumes of light crude to the Enbridge system, particularly in North Dakota. So now the company is expanding capacity to get that light crude to market in eastern Canada and the US Midwest. Today we continue our coverage of Enbridge’s expansion plans.

RBN expects total Canadian crude production to grow to more than 5 MMb/d by the end of 2019 – an increase of 1.4 MMb/d over 2013. Most of that new production will be heavy bitumen from Western Canada that will find its best market at US Gulf Coast refineries configured to process that type of crude. Trouble is pipeline capacity between the production regions in Alberta and the Gulf Coast is in short supply – a situation made worse by permit delays to the Keystone XL project.  A less high profile but just as critical set of projects, parts of which are about to come online expand existing Enbridge and Enterprise pipelines between Canada and Texas. Today we begin a two part series describing the impact of these new systems.