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Sept 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Coast Guard closed the upper
Houston Ship Channel on Thursday morning as 11 Greenpeace USA
protesters blocked a portion of the country's largest oil port
near Baytown, Texas, the agency said.
The channel is closed from Light 102A to Light 104, the
Coast Guard said in a notice.
The closure of the Ship Channel at that location blocks
tanker ship traffic to and from five major refineries in the
Houston area, including Exxon Mobil Corp's
560,500-barrel-per-day refinery in Baytown, which is 26 miles
(42 km) east of downtown Houston.
One ship was waiting to enter the Ship Channel, which links
the Gulf of Mexico and the Port of Houston, the nation's busiest
petrochemical port, and two ships were waiting to exit the
waterway, the Coast Guard said.
Ship traffic to Texas City, Texas, where two refineries and
several chemical plants are located, was not affected by the
closure on the upper Ship Channel.
Affected by the shutdown were also Valero Energy Corp's
205,000-bpd Houston refinery, LyondellBasell's
263,776-bpd Houston refinery, Chevron Corp's 112,229-bpd
Pasadena, Texas, refinery and Royal Dutch Shell Plc's
340,000-bpd Deer Park, Texas, refinery.
All of the refineries are able to ship out products via
pipelines and most have enough crude on hand to continue
operating at maximum capacity for several days.
The Houston Ship Channel stretches 53 miles (85 km) from its
entrance in the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of Houston.
(Reporting by Swati Verma in Bengaluru and Erwin Seba in
Houston; Editing by Bernadette Baum)