Company plans offshore crude terminal for large export ships 80 miles off Texas coast

Fuel Fix:
Houston's Enterprise Products Partners said it's planning to build a new oil export terminal offshore of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Enterprise wants to load oil for global export much faster now that it's begun servicing major vessels called Very Large Crude Carriers that can hold about 2 million barrels per shipment, roughly twice the volume of typical crude vessels. These vessels are headed to Asia and other global markets.

Enterprise loaded the first VLCC to ever dock at a Texas port in June when it took on an oil shipment in Texas City near Galveston. Enterprise said it's loading a second VLCC, the Eagle Victoria vessel, this week. Because of water depths, Enterprise can only fill the VLCC up with about 1.1 million barrels and the rest of the crude is transferred a little offshore in deeper waters from another vessel.

Enterprise wants to build a new export terminal complex about 80 miles offshore of the Houston Ship Channel entryway that's capable of loading and exporting crude oil at about 85,000 barrels per hour. This new terminal would be built farther offshore so it could load all 2 million barrels without needing another vessel.
...
They need to get that far offshore to get the necessary depth for the large ships.  The Texas shoreline has a gradual slope and the offshore terminals would give the large ships more room to maneuver.  Back when I used to do offshore sailboat racing I had a depth sounder on my boat that measured down to 500 feet.  You have to get a long way from the coast to reach that depth.  When I raced the boat on Lake Tahoe the depth was over 500 feet just after leaving the harbor.

This is more infrastructure for the export market.  I still maintain that refiners need to make the investment in changing their equipment to handle the light crude from the shale wells to enhance US national security and reduce imports.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more