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Take a Look at Me Now - Growing LPG, Ethane Exports Propel Enterprise Toward Bold Expansion Goals

LPG and ethane exports out of the U.S. continue to grow rapidly and are expected to reach 3.4 MMb/d by 2030. They are also critical parts of a plan by Enterprise Products Partners to expand its total liquid hydrocarbon exports to 100 MMbbl per month (100 MMb/month), a roughly 50% increase from current levels for crude oil, LPG and ethane, refined products and petchems. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll take a closer look at Enterprise’s LPG and ethane exports and how much they need to grow to reach the company’s ambitious goal. 

Enterprise CEO Jim Teague said during his appearance at RBN’s NACON: PADD 3 Conference in October that the company expected to continue the growth of its already impressive export portfolio, aiming to reach 100 MMb/month, or about 3.33 MMb/d. While Enterprise hasn’t spelled out how it intends to ramp up its liquid exports, in Part 1 we walked you through how it might all shake out. For the first nine months of 2024, Enterprise reported that it was exporting nearly 67 MMb/month (2.2 MMb/d) of liquid hydrocarbons (average of last nine stacked bars to far right in Figure 1 below), with crude oil (gray bar segments) accounting for 30.2 MMb/month (992 Mb/d), NGLs (LPG, ethane and natural gasoline; dark-blue bar segments) adding another 27 MMb/month (886 Mb/d), and refined products and petchems (light-blue segments) contributing 9.6 MMb/month (315 Mb/d).

Enterprise Liquid Hydrocarbon Exports

Figure 1. Enterprise Liquid Hydrocarbon Exports. Source: Enterprise

To move combined exports from 2.2 MMb/d to 3.33 MMb/d would require a jump of about 50%, or 1.1 MMb/d. (For the sake of our analysis, let’s assume as a starting point that the share of exports from each group will remain essentially constant, as it has since January 2021, although NGL volumes might be likely to grow more than crude oil due to Enterprise’s new gas processing plants in the Permian and new dock capacity being built at Neches River and Houston. More on those in a bit.) An across-the-board increase of 50% would push crude oil exports to nearly 1.5 MMb/d, NGL exports (including ethane) to about 1.3 MMb/d, and refined products/petchems to about 470 Mb/d. The focus of our first blog was crude oil. Today, we’ll look at the NGL side of the equation. 

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