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On the Move
The amount of crude oil
transported by rail, road and
water skyrocketed in 2012.
400 million barrels
Rail
Truck
300
200
Barge
100
0
'08 '09 '10 '11 '12
Source: Energy Information Administration
The Wall Street Journal

U.S. oil production has reached its highest level in two decades, while imports have fallen dramatically. A system built to import oil and deliver it to coastal refineries has become ill-equipped to handle rising production in Texas, North Dakota and Canada's Alberta province.

"All of the pipes are pointed in the wrong direction," says Harold York, an oil researcher at Wood Mackenzie. "We are turning the last 70 years of oil-industry history in North America on its head, and we are turning it on its head in the next 10 to 15 years."

With oil prices persistently above $100 a barrel, companies drilling new wells don't want to forgo revenue while they wait years for new pipelines. That leaves them with trucks, trains and barges to move an increasing amount of crude.

Oil delivered to refineries by trucks grew 38% from 2011 to 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, while crude on barges grew 53% and rail deliveries quadrupled. Although alternatives are growing rapidly, pipelines and oceangoing tankers remain the primary method for delivering crude to refineries.

In the Eagle Ford, a large four-year-old South Texas oil field, production has grown to more than 500,000 barrels a day, from less than 1,000 in 2009, according to state statistics. Getting that torrent out of the sparsely populated region has required modifications to the oil-delivery system.

For example, last year NuStar reversed a 16-inch pipeline built to carry crude imported from Africa and Europe northward from the Port of Corpus Christi. Now, the pipeline flows south, taking delivery from hundreds of trucks that fill up at individual wells. Some of the 175,000 barrels a day moving through the pipe is loaded onto barges at Corpus Christi and towed toward refineries near Houston.

Earlier this year, Phillips 66 began putting some of this crude on ships for a 2,200-mile journey around Florida to its refinery in Linden, N.J.

The heavy trucks moving Eagle Ford crude are causing headaches for residents and local officials, ripping up roads and causing traffic tie-ups.

"These are rural roads built for 10 cars an hour, and now it's 100 vehicles an hour, and 75 of them are 80,000-pound trucks," says Tom Voelkel, president of Dupre Logistics LLC. The Lafayette, La., company started hauling crude in Eagle Ford in November 2011 and has more than 100 drivers full time in the region.

The Texas Legislature appropriated $450 million this year to repair and improve roads in oil-producing counties. "It doesn't even begin to reach where it needs to reach," says Daryl Fowler, the chief elected county official in Cuero, Texas, about a hundred miles southeast of San Antonio.

"We've seen a fourfold increase in congestion around here," he says. "The roads are crumbling."

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