Louisiana’s refineries process vast amounts of domestic crude oil — much of it from the offshore U.S. Gulf — along with barrels imported from Canada, Venezuela and other countries. The refineries also play a critically important role in supplying gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the Southeastern U.S. and the Mid-Atlantic states, as well as lubricants and other specialty products nationwide. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss highlights from our new Drill Down Report on the 14 refineries in Louisiana (and two more just across the state line in Southern Arkansas), the pipelines that deliver crude oil to them, and crude oil balances in the Bayou State’s three refining regions.
When it comes to crude oil and refining, Texas gets most of the attention, and for good reason. It’s #1 in oil production, refining capacity, and exports of both crude and refined products. But don’t forget about Louisiana. While it’s not a Texas-sized oil producer, ranking only #10 if you count onshore and near-shore production (and #3 if you add production from the federally controlled deepwater Gulf), Louisiana’s #2 in refining, crude oil exports and refined products exports. The state is also home to some of the world’s largest and most technologically complex refineries, with the ability to break down vast amounts of heavy and medium oils into highly valuable gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
And, as we said in the introduction, refined product end users from Mississippi to Florida to New York City get a substantial share of their gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from refiners in Louisiana, many of which are tied into either the 2.5-MMb/d Colonial Pipeline, which runs to Northern New Jersey, or the 660-Mb/d Products (SE) Pipeline — formerly known as the Plantation Pipeline — which runs to Northern Virginia.
Given Louisiana’s outsized role, it’s important to understand where the state’s refineries — and a couple of smaller refineries in Southern Arkansas — source their crude oil, how that crude is delivered to the refineries, and how capital investments in oil pipelines and the refineries themselves have been impacting crude oil flows into, across and out of the state. That’s the aim of RBN’s newly released Drill Down Report, which discusses in some detail the pipelines that transport crude oil to Louisiana refineries from the offshore Gulf; from Houston and Nederland, TX; and from the hub in Longview, TX, the last of which feeds oil to refineries in Northwestern Louisiana and Southern Arkansas.
The report also groups the 16 refineries in our study area into three refining regions — see the three black ovals and pink-, blue- and green-shaded tables in Figure 1 below — explains how oil reaches them, and provides detailed crude oil balances for each.
