During the company’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday, Morch acknowledged the “competing project” without identifying Enterprise or its joint venture partner, London-based Navigator Gas, and said if it goes forward, there was a “less likelihood” of Odfjell building its project as well.

“We have said from the beginning that if you want to invest $350 million roughly in the first-of-its-kind export facility, we do not want to do that without having security that we have customers that support it, come hell and high water,” Morch said. “We were not able to get that and we still have discussions on it.“

Enterprise last month announced plans to move ahead on a new joint-venture 1 million mt/year ethylene export terminal on the US Gulf Coast to start up in the first quarter of 2020, with location and final investment decisions for the terminal subject to reaching acceptable arrangements with local tax authorities.

In October 2016, Enterprise CEO Jim Teague said the company could build it next to its ethane export facility at Morgan’s Point on the Houston Ship Channel.

Enterprise said its project was supported by long-term anchor customers that include Flint Hills Resources and a major Japanese trading company. Enterprise has not disclosed the project’s cost. Morch called Odfjell’s proposed 750,000 mt/year terminal “a great project if we get the right customer contracts, but we haven’t gotten them.”

Morch also said Odfjell will not make a final investment decision before such contracts are secured, but declined to say whether that step was still expected to occur by the end of March. Odfjell initially intended to make an FID in mid-2017, then pushed it to the second half of the year, and again pushed it to the first quarter of 2018 as the company. The company had aimed to start up a new terminal in the second half of 2019 when FID was slated for mid-2017.

“We do not rule it out,” he said. “But our risk appetite is not very high on a project like this.”

Both companies have been considering US ethylene export projects for more than a year in light of more than 11 million mt/year of new and expanded ethylene capacity slated to start up in Texas and Louisiana between 2016 and 2019, with more to come after that.

Odfjell, which already has all necessary permits for its project, envisions its terminal as a pressure valve for producers, providing an export option and a play for traders to leverage arbitrage when available if shutdowns or hiccups diminish ethylene demand by US derivative plants, according to sources familiar with company operations.

The terminal would be built at Odfjell’s current LPG, edible oils and petroleum terminal at Bayport — next to those ethylene pipelines operated by producers — and include an 80,000 cu m cryogenic storage tank that can hold up to 45,000 mt of ethylene.

Enterprise is planning to convert a 5.3 million-barrel underground ethane storage cavern at its operations at the US NGL hub in Mont Belvieu, Texas, to hold ethylene by Q1 2019. The company also aims to build a 24-mile, bidirectional pipeline connecting Mont Belvieu to Bayport.

Energy Transfer Partners has made a few public references to potential ethane and ethylene export projects at its crude oil and LPG terminal in Nederland, Texas, but has largely kept such plans under wraps.

The US currently has one ethylene export terminal, operated by Targa Resources at its ship channel terminal, and it is contracted to Mitsubishi Chemical. The facility has a loading capacity of 1,000 mt/d, so it takes about 10 days to load a Handysize vessel.

The proposed Odfjell terminal, by contrast, would fill a Handysize vessel in 24 hours at 21,600 mt/d. Enterprise said its project will be able to load 24,000 mt/d.

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