EOG: First CBR Bakken Oil to St James, Louisiana Terminal -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Link here.

EOG Resources said on Wednesday it received  its first crude from the Bakken shale oil fields in North Dakota at  the St. James, Louisiana terminal on April 15.

The terminal will have capacity to handle 50,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) of crude in June and 70,000 bpd by year end, the company said in its first-quarter earnings call. 

From the conference call:

I'll now address 2 other EOG key differentiators: Crude-by-rail and sand plants. Our St. James crude-by-rail facility received its first Bakken crude oil shipment on April 15, allowing us to begin capturing the current $15 Bakken in LLS price uplift. We now have the capability to move our Bakken, Eagle Ford and Wolfcamp crude to either Cushing or St. James.

Based on current differentials, the best NPV for our rail tanker fleet is to move our EOG Bakken oil to St. James and sell our Eagle Ford in the Houston and Corpus Christi markets. We expect our St. James facility to handle 50,000 barrels a day by June, increasing to 70,000 barrels a day by year end. We've provided guidance on our U.S. oil differentials relative to WTI for the second quarter in yesterday's press release.

For those modeling this net back benefit, remember that May will be a debugging month while we iron out the startup kinks, though likely to facility will run at intermittent capacity. We will not have the St. James facility fully operational for the entire second quarter, and not all of EOG's oil production will be sold to St. James. As market conditions and differentials change, we have great flexibility and can rapidly revise where we sell our production and how we get our production to market.