U.S. Scoops up Overseas Fuel Oil in pre-IMO Push
The United States is taking advantage of record-low prices of one of the world's dirtiest fuels by buying record volumes, which it intends to upgrade into cleaner products before new shipping rules take effect, trading and analyst sources say.U.S. trade sources said it recently had become economical to ship fuel oil from countries such as Russia, boosting imports of the product into the United States.This comes even as prices for high-sulphur fuel oil (HSFO) on the U.S. Gulf Coast…
Corpus Christi Gearing Up to Handle US Shale Export Boom
Port officials on Tuesday are expected to consider $300 million in financing that would prepare the country's largest oil-export port - Corpus Christi, Texas - to handle a surge in U.S. shale production over the next five years.International buyers would like more U.S. crude but are unable to get it because of infrastructure constraints along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Terminals originally designed for imports only recently have revamped operations to handle exports including accepting…
US Crude Sails to Asia as OPEC Weighs More Cuts
Oil tankers carrying around 10 million barrels of U.S. crude are en route to Asia, according to shipping data and trade sources, as U.S. producers take advantage of favorable prices to ship to the region while OPEC ponders further supply cuts next week. At least eight tankers are in transit, sources said and the shipping data in Thomson Reuters Eikon showed, with one of them carrying the first ever cargo of Southern Green Canyon crude purchased by Japanese refiner Cosmo Energy. Another contains the first Alaskan North Slope cargo to arrive in Asia in eight months.
East Coast Refiners Mull Texas Oil as North Dakota Alternative
U.S. East Coast refiners are looking to buy increasing volumes of domestic crude oil from the Gulf Coast, two sources said, the latest twist in a trade flow upheaval in the wake of the opening of the Dakota Access pipeline. Major U.S. East Coast refiners profited from railing hundreds of thousands of barrels of discounted Bakken crude to their plants daily from 2013 until 2015. But as more and more pipelines were built in North Dakota, the discount began to disappear, and so did the rail cars. Now, at least two East Coast refiners, Phillips 66 and Delta Air Lines Inc's subsidiary Monroe Energy, are looking to move more crude by ship from Texas into the Philadelphia area.
U.S. Refiners Cash in on Mexico's Record Imports
U.S. Gulf Coast refiners are cashing in on rising fuel demand from Mexico, shipping record volumes to a southern neighbor that has failed to expand its refining network to supply a fast-growing economy. The fuel trade could top a million barrels per day (bpd) at times in 2017 as Mexico becomes increasingly dependent on the United States for strategic energy supplies and providing business worth more than $15 billion a year to refiners such as Valero, Marathon Petroleum and Citgo Petroleum. The rise in Mexico's fuel imports reflects an economy that, after expanding for 27 quarters in a row even amid a public austerity plan, has been unable to increase its refining output to satisfy the consistent growth of its energy demand.
Canada Oil Sands Asia Export Dream Faces Port Bottleneck
The bullish view for Suncor Energy Inc (SU.TO), Cenovus Energy Inc (CVE.TO) and other Canadian energy producers calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by next month to approve a major pipeline expansion to the west coast, boosting sales of land-locked oil sands crude to Asia. But a growing number of shipping brokers and physical oil traders warn that any new influx of oil will hit a bottleneck in Vancouver, because of the port's inability to accept the megaships that dominate oil trade globally. This bottleneck marks one of the more under appreciated hurdles facing Canadian oil sands crude being shipped from its busiest port of Vancouver, these shipping brokers say. Middle Eastern producers already ship oil ship to Asia far more cheaply, thanks to the bigger vessels they employ. And U.S.
Oil Firms Rush to Exploit End of US Crude Export Ban
U.S. energy group Enterprise and oil trader Vitol raced to exploit the end of a 40-year ban on most U.S. crude exports, the first of many firms eager to "stress test" last week's historic opening. Despite a sudden change in global oil market conditions that many oil traders say has eliminated the economic advantage of shipping domestic crude far abroad, some companies that have long lobbied for the change in policy may be eager to show that their effort was not in vain, according to some experts. Houston-based pipeline group Enterprise Products Partners LP said in a statement it will provide pipeline and marine terminal services to load a 600,000-barrel cargo of domestic light crude oil scheduled for the first week of January.
Buckeye Pipeline Quietly Makes Key Acquisition
Houston-based logistic firm Buckeye Partners has spent more than $3.5 billion buying assets since 2010, transforming itself from a quiet regional pipeline utility into an emerging energy powerhouse. But the acquisition that may best symbolize its evolution is one the company didn't tout to investors this summer: a Washington lobbyist. After spending most of the past century pumping fuel from one place to another, the 128-year-old company has become a key player in the import and export of North American oil, with an unrivalled network of East Coast and Caribbean fuel depots and an expanding business loading crude oil from trains to tankers.
