Update on the Trans Mountain Pipeline - Mar 28

[dan_s]

A high percentage of the 890,000 barrels of crude oil per day will be shipped to California. Most of it will end up going to the Marathon Oil Refinery in Los Angeles. I bet the Climate Change Wackos in Hollywood will love this news.

A new market for Canadian oil – in Hollywood? The Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion is set to open any day now, and while the business case for the massive project has always been the potential to move landlocked Canadian crude to terminals in B.C. for export to global markets such as Asia, an interesting new customer base is opening up in the short term. Three oil tankers carrying almost 2 million barrels of Canadian crude have sailed from Vancouver to Los Angeles this month. That’s the biggest surge in four years, and at least two of the shipments were heavy crude bound for Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s Los Angeles refinery, the largest on the West Coast. While a lot of the expanded capacity is expected to be bound for fuel-hungry markets in Asia, refineries like Marathon’s on the West Coast may become a preferred customer due to proximity to Vancouver and the fact that the tankers coming in and out of the city are Aframax-sized, comparatively smaller vessels which are less likely to want to embark on long and expensive voyages to Asia if there is a closer customer.