Enbridge moves up expansion of Texas line

Reuters via Calgary Herald ^ | JUNE 19, 2012 | JULIE GORDON

[thackney]

Enbridge Inc. expects to complete an expansion of its newly reversed oil pipeline to Texas refineries by the end of this year, the company's in-coming chief executive said Monday.

That would be sooner than previous forecasts used by the company and its U.S. partner.

Enbridge and Enterprise Products Partners LP have been saying for months they would boost the capacity of the Seaway pipeline from the Cushing, Okla., storage hub to 400,000 barrels a day from 150,000 sometime in the first quarter of next year.

It is one of a number of pipe-line projects aimed at curing a bottleneck at the massive pipe-line hub, which is expected to reduce deep price discounts for oil that travels there from rapidly expanding U.S. and Canadian oilfields.

"We expect to bring another 250,000 barrels a day of capacity by the end of this year. But at some point, when we twin that Seaway line, we'll start to see a relaxing of this basis differential between Cushing and the Gulf Coast," Enbridge President Al Monaco said.

Monaco is slated to become CEO of the company, which moves the bulk of Canadian oil exports to the United States, this year.

Faster-than-expected growth in North American oil output means his company's other pipelines could be at full capacity as soon as 2016 despite a recently announced $3.2-bil-lion expansion of its system, he said.

The company expects to complete the expansion of its North American pipeline network in 2014, bulking up its 2 million bpd mainline, and tapping new refining markets in Quebec.

However, any relief for oil producers from the 2014 expansion could be short-lived as forecasts call for production from Canada alone to rise by more than half by the end of the decade.

That could choke the system once more if lines such as En-bridge's planned 525,000 bpd Northern Gateway pipeline to the Pacific Coast are not completed.

[marron]

Enbridge is building Keystone backwards. They’ve probably calculated that the line’s biggest obstacle will be gone a few months from now.

[thackney]

The Keystone XL pipeline portion from Cushing, OK to the Gulf Coast was broken out into a separate project no longer requiring State Department (and therefore presidential) approval.

That project is moving forward as well as others to reduce the Cushing Bottleneck to refineries.

http://www.transcanada.com/gulf-coast-pipeline-project.html

[BfloGuy]

The Keystone XL pipeline portion from Cushing, OK to the Gulf Coast was broken out into a separate project no longer requiring State Department (and therefore presidential) approval.

I wonder why Obama took credit for it, then. [Actually, I'm kidding.]