Enterprise Products Partners begins ethane shipments from Ethane Export Terminal
Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD) in its press release said that the first cargo of ethane to be exported from Enterprise’s Morgan’s Point, Texas terminal was loaded to the M/V JS INEOS Intrepid. The ship loaded with approximately 265,000 barrels of ethane set sail from the facility on Sept. 1st en route to the INEOS facility at Rafnes in Norway.
The Morgan’s Point ethane export facility, which is the largest of its kind in the world, has a design loading capacity of 10,000 barrels per hour.
The driving force behind development of the terminal is the growing international demand for abundant U.S. ethane from shale plays, which offers the global petrochemical industry a low-cost feedstock option and supply diversification. By providing producers with access to the export market, the Morgan’s Point terminal is also facilitating continued development of U.S. energy reserves.
Supply for the new ethane export terminal is sourced from Enterprise’s natural gas liquids fractionation and storage complex in Mont Belvieu, Texas and transported through a new 18-mile, 24-inch diameter pipeline that was completed in February of 2016. In addition, the Mont Belvieu complex is connected to ethane production from the Marcellus and Utica Shale regions through the ATEX pipeline.
Enterprise Products Partners L.P. is one of the largest publicly traded partnerships and a leading North American provider of midstream energy services to producers and consumers of natural gas, NGLs, crude oil, refined products and petrochemicals. The company specializes in: natural gas gathering, treating, processing, transportation and storage; NGL transportation, fractionation, storage and import and export terminals; crude oil gathering, transportation, storage and terminals; petrochemical and refined products transportation, storage and terminals; and a marine transportation business that operates primarily on the United States inland and Intracoastal Waterway systems. The partnership’s assets include approximately 49,000 miles of pipelines; 250 million barrels of storage capacity for NGLs, crude oil, refined products and petrochemicals; and 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas storage capacity.
