US crude exports in early stages of development
HOUSTON, April 28 (Reuters) – Enterprise Products Partners said on Thursday that it has ample dock capacity to ramp up US crude exports and could handle much more volume without further spending.
The midstream operator, which in December 2015 became the first company to announce it would export U.S. oil after Congress lifted the 40-year ban on doing so, operates one of the key crude export hubs on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
While growing in popularity, the opaque U.S. crude export market is only in its early stages of development. So far, many of the cargoes to leave U.S. ports are being tested by refiners abroad rather than delivered on a long-term contract basis.
The new opportunity to export crude from Enterprise’s Houston Ship Channel docks came just as Enterprise expanded its Gulf Coast LPG export terminal to handle some 16 million barrels per month of LPG.
“We’re making a lot more on LPG than crude and condensate,” Jim Teague, director and chief executive officer, said on a quarterly earnings call.
Enterprise on Thursday said two-thirds of its oil exports are crude, while the remainder are condensate. The company expects that ratio to remain steady through the end of the year.
Separately, Teague said the fees Enterprise collects on its newly expanded liquefied petroleum gas terminal on the Houston Channel have fallen as export capacity on the U.S. Gulf Coast has grown.
“We used to get 14 to 15 cents per gallon. We enjoyed a duopoly. I’m not going to tell you we’re going to have the same kind of margins, but we’re going to make it up in volume,” said Teague, adding that spot LPG volumes are selling for less than they did last year.
So far this year, 55 percent of its LPG exports have gone to Asia, up 7 percent from volumes delivered the same time last year, Enterprise said.
Total crude oil pipeline volumes on its system were 1.4 million barrels per day, unchanged from the first quarter of 2015, Enterprise said. In the Eagle Ford, volumes on the company’s South Texas Crude Oil Pipeline fell 24 percent to 238,000 barrels-per-day in the first quarter of 2016 versus the first quarter of 2015, Enterprise said.
“We think that prices have bottomed. Price improvement does not mean instantaneous throughput growth. I think it’s going to be pretty competitive near term,” Teague said.
(Reporting by Liz Hampton; Editing by Alan Crosby)