Enterprise Product Partners will load the first ethane cargo from its new Morgan's Point, Texas, terminal next month, company executives said Thursday.
The first ship to load a Gulf Coast ethane cargo will be arriving August 1, Enterprise CEO Jim Teague said during a quarterly earnings call.
"The ramp is throughout the remainder of the year," Manager of International NGLs Joseph Fasullo said. "A lot of it is being determined by the completion of projects on our customer's side, so it will be coming up throughout the balance of the year."
The facility is expected to export about 1.9 million b/month by the end of the year, he added.
The Ineos Insight, a vessel capable of carrying 40,000 barrels of ethane, is in the Gulf of Mexico destined for Houston, according to Platts cFlow trade-flow software.
Ineos, Braskem, Reliance Industries and Sabic are among those contracted to ship ethane from the new facility, which began startup flaring earlier this month. Enterprise had previously announced that its Morgan's Point terminal was 90% contracted.
Enterprise's 200,000 b/d ethane export terminal is the second of its kind to be built in the US, behind Sunoco's Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, facility, which loaded the first US waterborne ethane cargo to Europe in March.
Non-LST ethane, reflecting prices at the Enterprise terminal in Mont Belvieu, Texas, was trading at 19.375 cents/gal Thursday afternoon, 62.5 points higher than Wednesday.
