July 30, 2015 [Reuters] - A private Texas company already well-versed in treating and moving super-light crude oil has acquired a majority stake in a an oil-by-rail terminal in Port Arthur with plans to expand into refined fuels and other liquids.
San Antonio-based Howard Energy Partners LLC said on Wednesday the GT Omniport Terminal, which now handles crude, also will receive, store, blend and re-deliver gasoline, distillates and natural gas liquids.
The terminal can offload up to 160,000 barrels per day of railed-in U.S. and Canadian crude, and it has 230,000 barrels of storage capacity, deepwater and barge docks, and room to grow, Mark Helmke, senior vice president of terminals and transportation for Howard Energy, said in an interview.
Howard operates crude oil and natural gas gathering and processing systems in South Texas and Pennsylvania. Helmke said GT Omniport‘s close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, four major U.S. refineries in Port Arthur and Beaumont and the biggest domestic natural gas liquids hub in Mont Belvieu, Texas, caught Howard’s eye.
“Those new opportunities may be around the export, or even import, of refined products for blending and injection in to pipelines that run through that area,” Helmke said.
Major nearby gasoline and distillate pipelines include the Colonial Pipeline, the nation’s largest such system, which moves more than 3 million barrels from the U.S. Gulf Coast to the Northeast daily.
The Explorer Pipeline and Enterprise Products Partners’ TEPPCO pipelines also move products from southeast Texas to the Midwest.
Colonial Pipeline last month bought Royal Dutch Shell’s 3.2 million barrels of storage in the Port Arthur Products Station just east of the omniport. Helmke said Howard could augment whatever Colonial decides to do with that storage, such as blending fuels bound for the Northeast, with new storage and blending tanks and dock expansions at the omniport.
The same goes for the area’s refineries that may be constrained from expanding their on-site product blending, he said.
Those refineries include Motiva Enterprises’ 603,000 bpd Port Arthur plant, the largest in the United States, and others run by Valero Energy Corp, Total S.A. and Exxon Mobil Corp.
“As a terminal service provider, we think we’re probably in a better position to build tankage that’s specifically designed for blending,” Helmke said. “It’s easier for our guys to essentially take orders from the refining facilities and make custom blends for exports to certain markets.”
