Enterprise Products Partners and Navigator Holdings formed a 50-50 joint venture to create a new ethylene export facility in the US Gulf Coast that will have the capacity to export approximately 1 million tons of ethylene per year.
Refrigerated storage for 30,000 tons of ethylene will be installed on-site, making possible the loading of ethylene at rates of 1,000 tons per hour. The facilities are expected to be operational by the first quarter of 2020.
A.J. “Jim” Teague, chief executive officer of Enterprise’s general partner, commented: “By 2021, the petrochemical industry is expected to expand aggregate ethylene production capacity in Texas and Louisiana by nearly 50 percent to approximately 90 billion pounds per year. The resulting rapid growth in the supply of U.S. ethylene, combined with increased demand from international markets, like Asia, creates an ideal scenario in which markets abroad are able to diversify their supply by accessing cost-advantaged feedstocks made possible by the shale revolution in the United States.”
Enterprise will also build a high-capacity ethylene salt dome storage facility at its complex in Mont Belvieu, Texas. This strage facility will incorporate a capacity of about 600 million pounds with an injection/withdrawal rate of 420,000 pounds per hour. The storage facility is set to begin operations in the first quarter of 2019 and will facilitate connections to the eight ethylene pipelines within a half-mile of the Enterprise ethylene storage system. Moreover, the company will construct a new ethylene pipeline from Mont Belvieu to Bayport, Texas, beginning service in 2020.
The final investment decisions for the terminal are subject to reaching acceptable arrangements with local taxing authorities, Enterprise Products Partners informed.
