Jupiter Announces Pipeline Funding

Jupiter MLP LLC, a privately held midstream company that provides crude oil producers and gas plants with logistics and offtake solutions, announced October 17 that it has secured a funding commitment from Charon System Advisors sufficient to build the 1 million-barrel-per-day capacity Jupiter Pipeline from the Permian Basin to the Port of Brownsville, Texas.

With origination points near Midland, Pecos and Crane, Texas, and offtake points near Three Rivers, Texas, the pipeline is expected to be operational in late third quarter of 2020. Jupiter has completed engineering, design, and right-of-way planning.

As designed, it will be the only pipeline out of the Permian Basin that can access all three deep water ports in Texas (Houston, Corpus Christi and Brownsville) and will have direct access to a fully capable VLCC loading facility.

Charon’s investment comes on the heels of Jupiter announcing in May that it had secured all initial governmental and regulatory permits to load/unload vessels of up to 65,000 deadweight tons or Panamax-sized vessels at the Jupiter Export Terminal. Jupiter had already secured permits to construct more than 2.8 million barrels of storage in Brownsville and has additional permits on file to increase its storage footprint to more than 6 million barrels, of the potential 10 million barrels of storage capacity.

The company is also in the final stages of securing a permit to construct a 170,000 barrel per day processing facility that is designed to process light U.S. shale crude into on-spec U.S. gasoline and ultralow-sulfur diesel.

The shale oil boom has once again strained U.S. pipeline capacity, leading some experts to worry that lack of pipeline and port capacity could hamper the export boom in oil that the U.S. has been enjoying since Congress lifted export restrictions three years ago.