The controversy of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion projects has so far focused more on the implications of the project's delay for Albertan crude oil producers. Yet, the developments around the pipeline also have reverberations for the U.S. refining industry and more specifically that part of it which operates in the Pacific Northwest, a region without the luxury of many and different sources of crude to turn into fuel and other products for the local industries and households.
Canadian crude and crude from Alaska have been the traditional feedstock for Pacific Northwest refineries.
Now that production is growing and so are refining rates, local operators are buying oil from Russia, which, in the political context between the U.S. and Canada, and Russia, makes for an interesting ironic twist. Yet these are the realities of life, as Stewart Muir, executive director of Canadian think tank Resource Works, writes in a recent
story. If you can't get a commodity you need from one place, you'll have to get it from another.
Last month, Muir writes, a tanker under a Portuguese flag delivered between 600,000 bpd and 650,000 bpd of Russian crude to a refinery in Washington State, one of the two that produce fuel and oil products for Washington and Oregon.
This might become a more frequent occurrence as crude oil production in Alaska steadily declines and Albertan oil sands miners cannot get their growing output to refineries because of pipeline constraints. An alternative-railway deliveries of Bakken crude-was rejected by the Washington governor who, unlike most Trans Mountain protesters, has obviously familiarized himself with the safety statistics of various crude oil delivery methods.
Comment: It seems Europe is slowly coming to its senses, one country at a time.