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This hurricane season compares to a dull sporting event. The dreaded season for those along the Gulf Coast has been similar to a game where the hometown rival comes to town, expected to showcase some big plays and unleash some fireworks on the home team, but for unexpected reasons starts out flat. The rival shows sparks of momentum, but doesn’t execute or deliver the anticipated display to the home team.                              

A growing number of companies are “running” to build export terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. The reason for this growth is an excess amount of oil in the ports of Houston and Corpus Christi. Deepwater crude export terminals are needed from the thriving Permian Basin. Requiring billions of dollars of investment, they would stretch from Brownsville, Texas to southeastern Louisiana. “The congestion is shifting from the Permian Basin to the Gulf Coast,” said Sandy Fielden, director of oil and products research at investment research firm Morningstar. “There’s lots of traffic that these offshore terminals can sort of bypass.”

British Petroleum (BP) has announced the discovery of two new oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico and has approved a $1.3 billion expansion of its Atlantis three oil field.  The new expansion will include eight new wells to the existing offshore oil and gas platforms and they are speculating that it will increase production by 38,000 barrels per day by 2020.  The expansion comes nearly a decade after BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster that caused more than $60 billion in damages to the region.

 The Gulf Coast is being battered by strong winds and heavy rains courtesy of Tropical Storm Gordon, which hit the Louisiana-Alabama-Mississippi coastline Tuesday night.  As the storm approached land, the winds increased speeds and threatened to be categorized as a fully-fledged hurricane.  Meteorologists are predicting up to 1 foot of rain and inland flooding from Mississippi to Arkansas. 

Earlier this week the EIA stated that oil terminals on the Texas Gulf Coast exported more crude oil than they imported in April of this year; surpassing imports by 15,000 bpd.  A month later, the spread between imports and exports in Texas widened to 470,000 bpd which contributed to the U.S.’ record setting crude oil export total of 2 million bpd.  The Texas gulf coast had previously been credited with approximately half of the United States’ crude oil exports until this upsurge, bringing the area’s contribution up to 70% in May of 2018.