Deepening and widen Corpus Christi ship channel will allow two way supertanker traffic

Fuel Fix:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded its first contract in a $326 million project to deepen and widen the Corpus Christi Ship Channel.

Officials with the Corps awarded a $92 million contract to Illinois-based Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company, port officials confirmed on Thursday afternoon.

Dredging crews are expected to begin work out in the Gulf of Mexico just east of Port Aransas and continue through the entrance of the ship channel to Harbor Island.

Great Lakes is expected to begin the work in March or April and be finished within one year.

The $326 million dredging project involves deepening the entire ship channel from 45 to 54 feet and widening it from 400 to 520 feet.

The Port of Corpus Christi Authority has pledged to provide $100 million of its own money toward the project, leaving the remaining $226 million to be paid by the federal government over the next few years.

Once completed in 2022, the channel will be able to support two-way traffic of supertankers capable of carrying up to two million barrels of crude oil and refined products per shipment.

The dredging contract comes at a time when supertankers have been tested by various port customers. It also comes at a time the Port of Corpus Christi and its tenant Trafigura are seeking federal approval to build what could become rival crude oil export terminals to support a class of supertankers known as Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs.
...
The timing of the completion will be around the time more of the infrastructure for getting Permian Basin crude to the coast and will also correspond with added LNG facilities at the port.  Corpus Christi will be one of the main export facilities along with the Houston Ship Channel.  The Port of Brownsville is expected to be expanded to handle additional energy exports.

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