October 29, 2012 [Tulsa World] - Magellan officials showed off the massive facility Thursday to city councilors, a county official and the Tulsa World. The tour included details about pipeline safety and the fuels and additives that get blended at the tanks along West 21st Street and 33rd West Avenue.
The Tulsa-based company transports and stores refined petroleum products in a network stretching from the Gulf Coast to North Dakota and east to Chicago. The west Tulsa terminal moves gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, while also blending ethanol and various additives.
Magellan’s “hub and spoke” distribution system, in which the pipelines feed into terminals from various directions, is touted as so efficient that customers can have their fuel moved from the Gulf Coast refineries to Tulsa at a cost of only about four cents per gallon.
Trucks, however, roll in and out of the terminal at a steady pace every day, taking on refined petroleum to move to convenience stores and airports. The Magellan Tulsa terminal is connected by pipeline to all of Oklahoma’s five refineries and takes in at least 40 percent of its volume via those facilities, Heine estimated.
Greg Stratman, operations supervisor at the terminal, showed off the loading rack while hoses fed customers’ trucks with diesel and gasoline. The pale-green-tinted liquids paced through the hoses at up to 600 gallons per minute, Stratman pointed out.
The west Tulsa terminal has 33 tanks, varying in size from only 1,800 barrels to 700,000 barrels in capacity. Most of the refined fuels comes in via pipelines, although ethanol is off-loaded from trucks. A new 265,000-barrel tank is currently under construction, Stratman said.
Heine, responding to a question by Cue about Magellan’s employment plans, said the company employs more than 400 people in Tulsa and is poised for future growth projects, including new crude-oil pipelines and the people needed to help run them.
“We’ve been hiring regularly and we look to continue hiring,” Heine replied. “We do have significant growth plans.”
The west Tulsa terminal is part of a company-wide asset portfolio that includes close to 10,000 miles of pipeline and 82 other storage facilities. Magellan’s parent company, originally part of Williams Cos., bought the terminal from Great Lakes Pipeline Co. in 1966.
Williams spun off William Energy Partners LP in a 2001 initial public offering. The name was changed to Magellan Midstream Partners in 2003.
