Crude oil shipped on the Seaway Crude Pipeline System will take about 12 days to travel from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Houston once the pipeline reversal has started, a spokesman for Enterprise Products Partners said Wednesday.
The company said earlier Wednesday in a first quarter earnings release that it plans to reverse the flow on the pipeline "as early as May 17." The pipeline's initial capacity will be about 150,000 b/d, spokesman Rick Rainey said.
Rainey said crude oil will be able to travel five days between Cushing to Houston once the full line reversal, with a capacity of 400,000 b/d, is completed, which is targeted for early 2013. Capacity on the Seaway pipeline is expected to expand to 850,000 b/d in mid-2014, the company has said.
About two-thirds of the pipeline's current 150,000 b/d capacity is now committed, Mark Hurley, senior vice president-crude oil and offshore, told analysts on the company's conference call. Hurley said the "walk-up," or rate, is $3.82/b for lighter crude oils and $4.32/b for heavier crude oils.
Shippers pay a range of $2.75/b-$3.25/b if they have a long-term contract with Enterprise.
Enterprise Products Partners' CFO Randy Fowler said the company's 2012 capital growth spending will be $3.7 billion. The amount is higher than the company's earlier 2012 estimate of $3.5 billion and more than last year's $3.6 billion, Randy Burkhalter, an investor relations spokesman, said after the conference call.
Enterprise's net income in the first quarter rose to $651.3 million, or 73 cents/unit, up from $420.7 million, or 49 cents/unit, in the same period a year ago. Income for the most recent quarter got a boost from the sale of 26.3 million units of Energy Transfer Equity.
