“The acquisition market looks to us like it has gotten more and more pricey,” Anastasio told analysts during a third-quarter earnings conference call. The company wants to “stay in that game” but “we really have just got a full plate of internal growth at very attractive returns.”

However, he said NuStar has several new potential projects in the Eagle Ford and other shale plays on tap, and it expects to announce “a couple of these projects prior to the end of the year.” Anastasio did not elaborate.

Texas-based NuStar operates pipelines, crude oil storage facilities, refined product and asphalt terminals and asphalt refineries.

NuStar’s current projects include a linkup with EOG Resources to expand NuStar’s existing terminal at St. James, Louisiana, a major delivery hub for crude produced in the Gulf of Mexico.

NuStar last month began transporting Eagle Ford crude and condensate to Valero Energy Corp’s 142,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Corpus Christi in a reversed and converted 8-inch pipeline that had been used for refined products.

The company also aims to build a 55-mile (88.5 km) 12-inch pipeline by the second quarter of 2012 to connect existing pipeline segments from Corpus Christi to Valero’s 100,000 bpd refinery in Three Rivers, Texas.

Anastasio declined to specify the capacity of that new line, but he said that, when all projects are finished, NuStar expects to be transporting 250,000 bpd of crude from the Eagle Ford by mid to late 2012 or into 2013.

“The whole Eagle Ford thing is going very well,” he said. “It is really a boom in south Texas. I personally had a lot of skepticism a couple of years ago about how big a thing this could be and it is the real deal.”

The company was spun off from Valero Energy Corp several years ago and retains some of the infrastructure that feeds Valero’s lineup of refineries.