Every Little Thing - Pipeline Projects, Refinery Closures Alter Flows to Crude Export Venues

RBN Energy Blogcast

It’s possible for a single new infrastructure project to be a game-changer — the Transcontinental Railroad comes to mind, and so do the New York City subway system and the Hoover Dam. In the energy industry’s midstream sector, things work a little differently. There, projects are incremental. They’re privately, rather than publicly backed and so they must be commercially justified, which means they need to serve a specific purpose. That’s not to say they can’t shift the landscape of the areas they serve. For example, when the Shale Revolution transformed and disrupted U.S. hydrocarbon markets, supply and demand dynamics were turned on their head and waves of projects had to be built to handle surging production in suddenly supercharged shale plays like the Bakken, Appalachia, and Permian and to serve new markets, most notably exports. Sometimes, it’s a more complicated combination of projects and events that, as a group, cause not-so-subtle shifts in how things are done. Lately, handfuls of pipeline projects and refinery closures — plus increasing regional crude oil production in both the U.S. and Canada — have spurred changes in traditional pipeline-flow patterns and may breathe new life into oil-export activity at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port and the Beaumont-Nederland area in Texas. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss these changes and their effects.