A distillation tower as a petroleum product
Dweck represented Enterprise Products Partners LP when in March it became one of two companies to receive a letter from the BIS classifying condensate that was processed in a stabilizer with a distillation tower as a petroleum product.
The BIS hasn’t sent any other letters despite requests from about 20 companies, Dweck said. BHP said earlier this month that it had classified its processed condensate as a product itself and would export a cargo. More companies soon will follow suit, Dweck said at the recent Argus Condensate and Naphtha Markets conference in Houston.
U.S. crude production has jumped 65 percent in the past five years to 9.06 million barrels a day, driven by shale oil drilling in places such as Texas and North Dakota. About 650,000 barrels of that is a superlight kind of crude known as condensate, with an API gravity above 50, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Crude oil is a brew of different kinds of hydrocarbons that evaporate into volatile gases at different temperatures. The lighter the molecule, the lower the temperature at which it evaporates. Condensate has more propane and butane that evaporate at normal, everyday temperatures.
Producers in shale fields such as South Texas’ Eagle Ford built stabilizers to heat up the condensate enough to separate the volatile gases from the rest.
Enterprise and Pioneer Natural Resources Co. successfully lobbied the BIS to agree that putting condensate through a stabilizer with a distillation tower was the same as putting oil through a refinery’s distillation tower, meaning the resulting products should be exportable.