In long-term agreements with Chevron Corp., Enterprise Products Partners on Tuesday agreed to provide more Permian Basin oil takeaway, and it pulled the trigger on a Texas offshore oil terminal.

In a suite of agreements with Chevron U.S.A. Inc., Enterprise said it would provide Permian crude transportation, as well as storage and marine terminaling services at its Enterprise Crude Houston, aka ECHO, terminal in Houston.

“These agreements support our Permian offtake strategy by providing greater takeaway capacity for our increasing Permian production,” said Chevron Supply & Trading President George Wall. “As our production scales up, we will have the means to get those energy resources to the market.”

Chevron, already one of the biggest producers in the Permian Basin, expects to more than double its output to 900,000 boe/d by 2023.

The agreements provide for storage at ECHO, which has a total capacity of 8.3 million bbl. The terminal connects to all refiners situated along the Houston Ship Channel (HSC), including in Pasadena, Texas City and Beaumont/Port Arthur.

Because of another long-term agreement with Chevron, Enterprise also has sanctioned the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT), which is to include onshore facilities in Brazoria County east of Houston and a fixed platform about 30 nautical miles offshore in 115 feet of water.

“The SPOT facility provides opportunity to significantly expand our export capacity and access multiple market centers as we increase our crude oil produced out of the Permian,” Wall said.

SPOT would be designed to load very large crude carriers at rates of around 85,000 bbl per hour or up to 2 million b/d. The design would meet or exceed federal requirements “and, unlike existing and other proposed offshore terminals, is designed with a vapor control system to minimize emissions,” Enterprise noted.

With the flexibility to allocate loading across multiple export facilities, Enterprise would be able to optimize its HSC facilities by creating additional capacity to load growing liquefied petroleum gas, ethane and petrochemical export volumes.

Enterprise needs to obtain approvals and licenses from the Maritime Administration, which it said is reviewing the SPOT application.

The Houston operator has been considering an offshore oil terminal for more than a year, as Lower 48 oil supply continues to expand. Several competing oil export projects, nearly sited further south near Corpus Christi, also are on the drawing board.