Piney Point Petroleum Terminal

Serving the Washington area since 1904, the family-owned Steuart Investment Company, headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, operated many businesses, including the Steuart Petroleum Company, also established in 1904, and became the Baltimore/Washington area's largest independent commercial and residential supplier of oil, lubricants, and fuel. In 1949, Steuart Petroleum purchased a 320-acre farm bordering the Potomac River and Piney Point Creek, where it established a docking facility and tank farm that operated for 45 years delivering petroleum products on the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. The company built a 1,200-foot pier extending into the last deep water channel on the Potomac River, where domestic and foreign tankers docked and unloaded jet fuel, No. 2 home heating oil, No. 6 industrial fuel oil, and liquid asphalt. These refined products were pumped through six pipelines, each about 5,200 feet long, to the storage and distribution facility across Piney Point Creek. Twenty-eight storage tanks, ranging from 90 feet to 310 feet in diameter, held between 54,000 and 500,000 barrels of fuel, making the facility one of the largest in the United States. The present location of the Piney Point Lighthouse Museum was owned by the United States Navy from 1941 until 1960, then purchased by Steuart Petroleum and used by its affiliate, Steuart Transportation Company, as headquarters operations. Steuart Petroleum ended its 46-year-long business in 1995, when it was sold to Support Terminals Operations Partnership, known as ST Services; ST Services sold it to Valero Energy L.P. in 2005, and after Valero Energy divested its interest in Valero L.P. in 2007, Valero L.P. reorganized as NuStar Energy L.P.

Piney Point, Maryland · United States