Enterprise Products Partners LP, the second- largest midstream company in the U.S., canceled plans for a pipeline delivering Bakken oil to Oklahoma amid plunging oil prices and competing pipeline projects.
There wasn’t enough interest from potential shippers to go ahead with the project, the Houston-based company said in a statement. The line would have carried 340,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) of oil from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota to the Cushing, Okla., storage hub starting in 2016.
U.S. crude futures have fallen 37% in the past three months to a five-year low of $57.81/bbl amid a surge of U.S. output. The Independent Petroleum Association of America warned in November that crude producers in the Bakken region and other tight-oil plays will probably trim output next year because of the price drop. True Cos., Hiland Partners and Energy Transfer Partners LP are among those developing pipeline projects to move more Bakken crude to market.
Enterprise’s decision is “not really surprising, given the other competing pipeline projects that are under way to deliver oil out of the Bakken,” Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston, said by telephone. “In totality, all of these pipelines add about another 1 million barrels a day of takeaway capacity out of the Bakken, which really makes the Enterprise project questionable.”
Bakken crude has traded at an average discount to U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude of $5.38/bbl over the past year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The discount reflects the costs of transporting the crude from North Dakota to refineries.
North Dakota’s Bakken formation supplies more than 1 million bbl/d (MMbbl/d) of oil. At the end of last year, there was pipeline space for about 583,000 bbl/d of it. That’s forecast to grow to 773,000 by the end of 2014 and to as much as 1.7 MMbbl/d by the end of 2017, according to the state’s Pipeline Authority.
Oil that can’t be shipped by pipeline is sent in rail cars, at a cost of $10 to $15/bbl.
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