Manitou CBR Terminal

[Wells coming off confidential list today have been posted.]

I had kind of forgotten about Manitou oil field until I started seeing the name pop up more and more often in daily activity reports.

This might be one of the reasons, from today's RBN Energy essay on CBR terminals east of the Mississippi River. [For list of CBR terminals in the Bakken, click here.] In that essay, RNB devotes a rather long section to the "Bakken St James Shuttle":

We previously covered the two companies (Plains All American and NuStar) that are unloading crude from rail at St. James in our series on Gulf Coast terminals.

The Plains All America rail terminal can offload up to 140 Mb/d from unit trains and has been running at full capacity recently.

Plains have two loading terminals in the Bakken at Van Hook and Manitou.

The larger terminal is Manitou (65 Mb/d) on the BNSF network that can ship crude direct to St. James. The NuStar terminal in St James is joint owned with EOG resources that use 80 Mb/d of the 100 Mb/d capacity to unload crude from their own production.

EOG has a rail terminal in the Bakken at Stanley that ships up to 75 Mb/d exclusively to St. James and they also have production in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford, some of which is also shipped by rail to St. James. Like Plains, the NuStar terminal at St. James is running at close to full capacity.

NuStar is in the process of developing a second unloading terminal at St. James that will more than double their capacity to over 250 Mb/d. The new capacity will belong exclusively to NuStar.

At the moment the crude by rail shipments from North Dakota to St. James are the closest thing to a pipeline on wheels that the US energy industry has seen. As much as 240 Mb/d of crude is being loaded onto unit trains and shipped down this route with a stream of empty rail tank cars returning to load up again. That’s railing crude all right!

[NOTE: if folks are not reading the RBN Energy essays regularly, they are missing perhaps the best series on the Bakken revolution.]