Making America Great -- Nice Problem To Have -- After Huge Buildout, US Still Has Insufficient Capacity For All Its Fossil Fuel -- Further Buildout Will Impact GDP -- October 30, 2017

From last week:

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Now this story from The Christian Science Monitor:

Tankers carrying record levels of crude are leaving in droves from Texas and Louisiana ports, and more growth in the fledgling US oil export market may before long test the limits of infrastructure like pipelines, dock space, and ship traffic.

US crude exports have boomed since the decades-old ban was lifted less than two years ago, with shipments recently hitting a record of 2 million barrels a day. But shippers and traders fear the rising trend is not sustainable, and if limits are hit, it could pressure the price of US oil.

How much crude the United States can export is a mystery. Most terminal operators and companies will not disclose capacity, and federal agencies like the US Energy Department do not track it. Still, oil export infrastructure will probably need further investment in coming years. Bottlenecks would hit not only storage and loading capacity, but also factors such as pipeline connectivity and shipping traffic.

Analysts believe operators will start to run into bottlenecks if exports rise to 3.5 million to 4 million barrels a day.

The headline is a bit misleading; the very next paragraph:

The US has not come close to that yet. A total of the highest loading days across Houston, Port Arthur, Corpus Christi, and St. James/New Orleans – the primary places where crude can be exported – comes to about 3.2 million b/d.

But then this:

But with total US crude production currently at 9.5 million barrels a day and expected to add 800,000 to 1 million b.p.d annually, export capacity could be tested before long. Over the past four weeks, exports averaged 1.7 million b.p.d, more than triple a year earlier.

And earlier today RBN Energy blogs that natural gas pipelines coming out of the Permian have reached full capacity.

Maybe we need to start tracking docks. At the CSM link above:

For instance, exports are expected to start from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) in early 2018 at around one supertanker a month. Its location 18 miles offshore means it can handle larger vessels than other, shallower ship channels.

In Houston, when looking at the top 30 loading days, crude exports averaged 700,000 b/d, Kpler added. That includes Enterprise's Houston terminal, among the largest of the export facilities, that had 615,000 b/d.

Other terminal operators are also developing additional facilities. NuStar Energy LP currently can load between 500,000 to 600,000 b.p.d at its two docks in Corpus Christi, which has about 1 million in capacity, according to a port spokesman. NuStar is developing a third dock, which should come online either late first quarter or early second quarter.

In Houston, Magellan Midstream Partners LP is planning a new 45-foot draft Aframax dock for mid-2018. Aframax vessels can carry about 500,000 to 700,000 barrels of crude.