Phillips 66’s Freeport, Texas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) export terminal has been exporting and will continue to export near maximum capacity at about eight cargoes a month, senior executives at Phillips 66 said last week during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

Phillips 66 is also eyeing plans to build new fractionators at Sweeny, Texas, they said. The company will not decide on a possible second ethane cracker project until 2019-2020.

Of that monthly export total of eight cargoes, six term cargoes are contracted to third parties and two spot cargoes are available to Phillips 66 to use as part of the company’s commercial LPG trading operations, said Tim Taylor, president of Phillips 66. This 6:2 ratio may shift as the export cargoes are not ratable, but Phillips 66 remains optimistic on the Gulf Coast LPG term export operations.

Phillips 66 commissioned its 150,000-b/d LPG export terminal at Freeport in the fourth quarter of 2016, and it shipped out its first commercial cargo in mid-December. Phillips 66 expects the Freeport facility to be loading to near maximum capacity in February 2017, Taylor said.

Greg Garland, Phillips 66’s CEO, said that the Freeport LPG export operations netted an EBITDA of $5.5 million in December 2016.

That terminal exported eight cargoes in January, and the export volume is expected to be the same for February and March, Garland said.

“We’re interested in and actually have contracts in Europe, Mexico, Latin America and Asia. And so there’s volumes flowing to all three,” Taylor said, adding that Europe and Asia buys LPG from the U.S. for mostly petrochemical use, and Mexico and Latin America need LPG mostly for heating purposes.

“We’re seeing good pull out of Asia. Good demand out of Europe as well as some demand out of Latin America. And so heating season in the northern hemisphere has been a pull. And then petrochemical demand has been good as well. So I think the good news is on the volume side,” he said.