[excerpt] Houston-based Enterprise is one of the country’s largest shippers and processors of natural gas, including 49,100 miles of onshore and offshore pipelines.
The facility in Chambers County — about 35 miles northeast of Houston — includes massive underground natural gas storage caverns as well as a natural gas fractionation plant, where natural gas liquids are separated into different components before being put into storage or injected into pipelines. It has a capacity of about 305,000 barrels of natural gas liquids per day.
Recently the facility has become an important hub to oil and gas producers in South Texas’ Eagle Ford shale formation, where large quantities of natural gas liquids are being extracted and then processed for usage by Gulf Coast petrochemical plants and other customers.
In addition to the 300,000 barrel-per-day fractionator, the Mont Belvieu site also has 34 underground caverns with capacity to store 100 million barrels of products -– or almost a year’s worth of produced natural gas liquids such as ethane, propane and butane.
Because the Mont Belvieu facility handles such huge volumes, even small accidents can affect prices of those fuels, said Adam Bedard, senior director of energy analysis at Bentek Energy in Evergreen, Colo.
“If the supply of natural gas liquids is affected, either because of the fire at the storage units or the fractionator goes down, you could see upward pressure on natural gas liquids prices,” he said.
That could be bad news for refineries and petrochemical plants that are the biggest users of the liquids.
In response to the accident, LyondellBasell Industries reduced output at its chemical plants in La Porte and Channelview, which receive ethane and propane from the Mont Belvieu complex. David Harpole, a company spokesman, said the plants are currently looking for alternate ways to source the fuels.
Exxon Mobil was taking safety precautions to ensure the fire did not harm its Baytown refining and chemical complex, said company spokesman Kevin Allexon. The complex remained operational late Tuesday afternoon and was meeting all customer commitments, he said.
The impact on other petrochemical producers in the area was not immediately clear.
Meanwhile, regulators were keeping a close eye on the situation to gauge how to proceed.
“We’re working with state and local officials in determining next steps,” said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in Washington, D.C..
The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates pipelines and other oil and gas operations in the state, is not involved in the Enterprise incident, office spokeswoman Ramona Nye said. [end excerpt]
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/02/08/natural-gas-facility-in-mont-belvieu-explodes/