Keystone XL - Lite -- Flipping The Capline -- July 19, 2021

An answer to the Keystone XL that was killed? Remember, the whole purpose of the Keystone XL pipeline (and other pipelines from the north, flowing south) was to bring heavier oil from Canada to the US refineries along the Texas-Louisiana gulf coast to "balance out" all that light WTI oil arriving at refineries configured to handle heavier oil.

Re-posting from earlier this morning:

RBN Energy: the St James crude oil hub readies for Capline-related changes, part 3. Archived.

In just a few months, heavy crude from Western Canada will start flowing south on the Capline pipeline from the Patoka, IL, hub to the one at St. James, LA. 

While the initial volumes will be modest, Capline’s long-awaited reversal will provide Louisiana refineries and export terminals with easier, lower-cost access to oil sands and other Alberta production. 

Flipping the pipeline’s direction of flow also means more changes for the St. James storage and distribution hub — one of the U.S.’s largest — which has already seen more than its share of evolution during the Shale Era. Today, we continue our Capline/St. James blog series with a look at St. James’s terminals and pipelines, the Louisiana refineries they supply, and the changes coming with the Capline reversal.

The obvious question is this: how does western Canadian oil sands oil get to Patoka. From RBN Energy (archived here; not-accessible to readers): 

There are five pipelines flowing into Patoka with a combined capacity of just over 2 MMb/d:

• MPLX’s 454-Mb/d Woodpat Pipeline, which receives crude oil from two upstream pipelines — MPLX’s 360-Mb/d Ozark Pipeline from Cushing and Enbridge’s 145-Mb/d Platte Pipeline from Casper and Guernsey, WY. The Platte Pipeline transports heavy Western Canadian crude fed into it by the Express Pipeline as well as light crude produced in the Bakken, the Powder River Basin, and the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin.
• TC Energy’s 590-Mb/d Keystone Pipeline — not to be confused with the company’s now-dead Keystone XL — which runs from Hardisty, AB, to Steele City, NE; from there, one spur of the pipeline heads east to Wood River and Patoka and the other heads to the Cushing hub, where it connects to TC Energy’s Marketlink Pipeline to the Gulf Coast.
• The 570-Mb/d Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which runs from the Bakken to Patoka and which is co-owned by Energy Transfer (with a ~36% share), Enbridge (with ~28%), Phillips 66 (with 25%), MPLX (with ~9%), and ExxonMobil (with ~2%). DAPL is part of the Bakken Pipeline System, which also includes the 742-mile Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline (ETCOP; mustard line) from Patoka to Nederland, TX. (Our most recent review of DAPL was Don’t Wanna Lose You in February, 2021.)
• Enbridge and MPLX’s 300-Mb/d Southern Access Extension Pipeline, a 168-mile connector between Flanagan, IL, and Patoka that receives Western Canadian crude oil from Enbridge’s 900-Mb/d Southern Access Pipeline (light purple line), which is part of Enbridge’s 2.9-MMb/d Mainline system. (Enbridge holds a 65% ownership interest in Southern Access Extension and MPLX holds 35%.)
• ExxonMobil and Enbridge’s 100-Mb/d Mustang Pipeline, which runs from Lockport, IL (a suburb of Chicago) to Patoka. (ExxonMobil has a 70% stake in Mustang and Enbridge has a 30% stake.)