From the Houston Business Journal
Enterprise Products Partners LP (ticker: EPD) and Navigator Holdings Ltd. (ticker: NVGS) plan to create a 50-50 joint venture to develop an ethylene marine export terminal on the Houston Ship Channel.
The companies announced July 12 that they’ve signed a letter of intent for the joint venture, but they still have to negotiate and receive board approval on a definitive agreement. Commercialization of the project would require sufficient long-term customer commitments.
The proposed terminal would be built at Enterprise’s Morgan’s Point complex, where the company already has the world’s largest ethane marine export terminal. The Houston company would manage the construction, operations and commercial activities of the new terminal, while Navigator Gas would utilize its fleet of 14 ethylene-capable vessels to deliver ethylene to customers.
The new terminal would connect to Enterprise’s ethylene salt dome storage and ethylene pipeline system, both of which currently are under construction. The storage facility will have approximately 600 million pounds of capacity, and the pipeline system will connect to ethylene producers and consumers along the Gulf Coast.
“Customers (of the proposed terminal) would have the ability to manage the transportation and storage of ethylene supplies from the tailgate of producing facilities to domestic and international consuming derivative plants,” Enterprise CEO A.J. “Jim” Teague said in a press release. “The proposed ethylene export terminal would provide U.S. petrochemical companies critical market diversification rather than relying solely on polyethylene export markets.”
Enterprise is the Houston area’s sixth-largest public company, based on its $23 billion in 2016 revenue, according to Houston Business Journal research.
Another project the company has underway is a 300 million-cubic-foot-per-day natural gas gathering system, called the Sand Dunes gathering project, in the westernmost part of the Permian Basin. In conjunction with that project, Enterprise also recently announced it is doubling the capacity at the Orla processing facility in Reeves County, Texas, to 600 million cubic feet per day, increasing it by the same amount that the Sand Dunes system will be able to deliver.
