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Dinnertime in New England. Heat wave.
Louisiana refineries don’t pipe in all the crude oil they need from the Houston and Nederland, TX, areas or the U.S. Gulf, or ship it in from abroad. Some in northwestern Louisiana (and nearby southern Arkansas) depend on crude piped in from Longview, TX, and others get at least some of their oil from Capline, a large-diameter pipe that moves both heavy and light crude south from the hub in Patoka, IL. In today’s RBN blog, we continue our series on Louisiana’s refineries and the sourcing and delivery of their crude, this time focusing on the pipelines that move crude in from Longview and Patoka — and out from St. James, LA.
In Part 1, we said the 14 refineries in Louisiana and two just over the state line in Southern Arkansas account for almost one-fifth of total U.S. refining capacity and can consume more than 3 MMb/d of crude oil from a wide range of domestic and foreign production areas. We also noted that the sourcing of that crude has been shifting over the past few years, with the pace picking up as more U.S. Gulf production flows to Texas (and less flows to the Bayou State), new pipeline projects increase eastbound and southbound flows into Louisiana, and refineries modify their crude slates to optimize their economics.
Part 1 also divided the 16 refineries into three buckets — Southeastern Louisiana (eight refineries with a combined capacity of more than 2.1 MMb/d; pink-shaded rows in Figure 1 below), Southwestern Louisiana (three with 911 Mb/d; blue-shaded rows), and Northwestern Louisiana and Southern Arkansas (five with 176 Mb/d; green-shaded rows) — and pointed out that refineries in each of the buckets generally turn to many of the same sources for their crude oil and use pretty much the same means to deliver oil to their facilities.
For example, most of the crude oil used by refineries in Southeastern Louisiana is either piped in from the U.S. Gulf; piped in from onshore platforms to the southwest, northwest or north; or shipped in by tanker or barge. In contrast, two of the three refineries in Southwestern Louisiana get the vast majority of their oil via three pipelines out of southeastern Texas (Bayou Bridge, Sour Lake and Zydeco) and the other (Calcasieu Refining’s Lake Charles facility) depends almost entirely on waterborne deliveries. As for the refineries in Northwestern Louisiana and Southern Arkansas, they turn to a combination of piped-in, railed-in or trucked-in crude for virtually all of their needs.
Part 1 also divided the 16 refineries into three buckets — Southeastern Louisiana (eight refineries with a combined capacity of more than 2.1 MMb/d; pink-shaded rows in Figure 1 below), Southwestern Louisiana (three with 911 Mb/d; blue-shaded rows), and Northwestern Louisiana and Southern Arkansas (five with 176 Mb/d; green-shaded rows) — and pointed out that refineries in each of the buckets generally turn to many of the same sources for their crude oil and use pretty much the same means to deliver oil to their facilities.
For example, most of the crude oil used by refineries in Southeastern Louisiana is either piped in from the U.S. Gulf; piped in from onshore platforms to the southwest, northwest or north; or shipped in by tanker or barge. In contrast, two of the three refineries in Southwestern Louisiana get the vast majority of their oil via three pipelines out of southeastern Texas (Bayou Bridge, Sour Lake and Zydeco) and the other (Calcasieu Refining’s Lake Charles facility) depends almost entirely on waterborne deliveries.As for the refineries in northwestern Louisiana and souther Arkansas and other (Calcasieu Refining's Lake Charles facility) depends almost entirely on waterborne deliveries. As for the refineries in northwester Louisiana and southern Arkansas, they turn to a combination of piped-in, railed-in, or trucked-in crude for virtually all of their needs.
