April 24, 2014 [KrisTV] - For the first time ever, the Port Corpus Christi is exporting more crude oil than it's importing. Steven Schmidt, the Operations Director at NuStar Energy has seen the transformation unfold first hand. "It's changed the whole face of what we do here at the Corpus Christi terminal," Schmidt said.
Schmidt says in the thirteen years he’s been in the business, that he’s never seen anything like the explosive changes happening at the port. In order to keep up, his company did a complete 180.
“We’ve completely reversed this facility, and now everything we do is ship crude oil out over the water to various customers.”
Nustar Energy Corpus Christi went from strictly importing crude oil to strictly exporting it in the last two years. In fact, they’ve been shipping out so much oil, that they had to build a new multi-million dollar dock to accommodate it all. The company went from shipping 200 thousand barrels a day to 700 thousand barrels a day.
And it’s all thanks to the booming Eagle Ford Shale. “The demand was there,” Scmidt said. “There’s so much production here and the demand is elsewhere, that it made sense for us to do it.”
And Nustar isn’t alone.
The entire port has gone from 0 to 122 million; that’s 122 million barrels of crude oil that was exported last year alone.
And with more ships going out, there’s more money rolling in.
“We are making more money,”John Pasch is the Deputy Director of Operations at the Port. “…We are investing more in our infrastructure that we have ever invested in our entire history since 1926.”
And Pasch estimates that as oil and gas production in the Eagle Ford Shale ramps up, so will the trend of exporting product at the port.
