March 17, 2011 [Dow Jones Newswires] - The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, said Wednesday it is asking the state government for permission to add 3.6 million barrels of offshore crude-oil storage.
LOOP, which bills itself as the country’s only deep-water port, said it asked the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to allow it to build six 600,000-barrel tanks that would allow customers to more easily change the type of crude oil they can store at the site. LOOP currently operates 62.2 million barrels of crude-oil storage, most of it in eight underground caverns.
“The new tanks would give customers a little more flexibility in the type of crude oil they can store,” LOOP spokeswoman Barb Hestermann said.
U.S. refiners have been upgrading their facilities to accept a wider range of crude oil, including heavy crudes from the U.S. Gulf.
Hestermann declined to say how much building the additional storage would cost LOOP. LOOP has already started building the foundations for the new storage and hopes to finish construction by mid-2012, Hestermann said.
LOOP’s onshore facilities, Fourchon Booster Station and Clovelly Dome Storage Terminal, are located at Fourchon, La., according to the agency’s website. Its offshore marine-terminal facilities are 18 miles south of Grand Isle.
Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO), Murphy Oil Corp. (MUR), and Shell Oil Co., a unit of Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA, RDSA.LN), run LOOP as a joint venture.
