Crude Oil Imports- Houston and Texas City

Crude oil imports for the week of Dec. 22-28 in the Ports of Houston and Texas City have been entering the ports without any problems. Over the past week there has been nearly a dozen supertankers from Africa and the Persian Gulf offloading their crude cargo offshore at the Galveston lightering area to shuttle Aframax tankers.

The only disruption from crude imports might be a slight delay in imports from oil terminals in the Bay of Campeche, where Dos Bocos, Cayo Arcas, and Pajaritos load crude oil onto Aframax tankers. Last week strong winds and high seas prevented the loading of tanker ships for approximately a day.


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Approximately 40 % 0f the imported crude in the Port of Houston is high sulfur Mexican Mayan crude and the Shell Deer Park refinery receives over half of all Mayan crude entering the port. Furthermore, nearly 20 % of the imported crude entering the Port of Texas City is Mexican Mayan crude.

From EIA data of October 2007, on the average 3.5 million barrels of Mexican crude entered these ports in a week, which is equivalent to 7 Aframax tanker ships. Crude oil analysts at VesselTrax through their vessel movement modeling analysis foresee a 1.5-2.0 million barrel deficit for the week which would be made up the following week .

Oil Supply Concerns Misleading

The rise in the price of crude oil of over that past two weeks seems to stem mostly from fear and greed as this commodity is traded haphazardly in the global markets. Of great concern is how information concerning cause and effect can be misleading creating chaos. The general public becomes the victim especially when the price being paid for gas and heating oil in conjunction with the price increase of crude oil.

Much of that drop was due to a decline in imports of almost a million barrels a day because fog closed the Houston Ship Channel last week, analysts said.

Source: ap.google.com via watermon

Shortly after the Energy Information Agency released the production, imports stocks, supply, prices, data and analysis with This Week in Petroleum report on December 12, oil futures started to rise at the NYMEX. One reason that's stated for the rise was a decrease in the weekly supply of crude stocks and imports, which many commodity analysts stating was caused by a delay in tanker ships inbound the Houston Ship Channel, which was closed due to fog from December 9th -11th.

For instance, immediately following the fog clearing the shipping channel reopened and 25 tanker ships transporting approximately 12,000,000 barrels of crude oil entered the ports of Texas City and Houston supplying the refineries over the next three days ending on Friday December 14, 2007. The EIA TWIP report in question was based on the time period from 8-14December. So where did the decline of imports occur if not on the Gulf Coast region?

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