A ship channel deepening and widening project in Corpus Christi Bay is in its final innings and about to start making a real impact. Later this summer, a 7-foot-deeper channel at Ingleside will allow terminals to load additional barrels onto VLCCs, assuming they have dredged their berths to match the deeper channel. Deepening the channel to 54 feet (from the old 47 feet) will also allow terminals that have deepened their berths to fully load 1 MMbbl Suezmax, up from the 800-850 Mbbl that can be loaded now. South Texas’ crude oil export economy will get another boost in late 2024 when the fourth and final part of the $680 million dredging project is completed. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the dredging project, its ongoing progress and its impact on the “battle for the barrels” between Corpus, the Houston area and a quartet of proposed offshore terminals.
It would be impossible to pick our favorite speaker or panel at RBN’s recent xPortCon 2023 conference, but the infrastructure geeks among us thoroughly enjoyed the morning panel on “Regional Export Dynamics – Corpus Christi,” which featured Phil Anderson, vice president of business development for Enbridge. ; Brian Freed, CEO of EPIC Midstream; and Omar Garcia, Director of External Affairs for the Port of Corpus Christi (POCC), who spearheaded the dredging project. (Videos of the entire xPortCon conference are now available — click here for more information.) For over 50 minutes, they discussed, in considerable depth (pun intended), the canal deepening and widening project and its impacts, as well as plans to add pipeline capacity between the Permian and Corpus and . building new crude oil storage to support growth. in exports.
As we’ve said in several blogs, Corpus Christi/Ingleside rose to the top among crude oil exporting areas in late 2019 and early 2020 following the commissioning of three major new pipelines from West Texas to Corpus: Cactus II, Gray Oak and Cru EPIC. In 2021, marine terminals in the Corpus area (gold layer in Figure 1 chart) accounted for about three out of every five barrels exported, and have maintained that share since then, sending an average of nearly 2.2 Mb/d in the first five and a half months of 2023, according to RBN Weekly Crude Voyager report
