From an interesting Q and A exchange:
I think you had a question about light oil as well. And particularly, in the St. James market, New Orleans, there's a tremendous demand for Bakken crude. There's nearly 400,000 barrels a day of Bakken crude moving by rail and maybe some by barge or boat. The barge movement to New Orleans at the moment tend to be more heavy crude coming down the Mississippi. So there's a good market for both.
But certainly, there's a strong light market that the Trunkline project with Energy Transfer will intend to facilitate.
The other thing is that looking at the very large volume of imported crude, the largest percentage of imported crude from abroad moves into the Gulf Coast market today. And inevitably, with greater and greater American and Canadian supply, that's going to back out those imports. And so there's an opportunity for backing out the imports in the Gulf Coast, and that's what's going to happen.
The other thing when you talk about the LLS pricing, that would be related to Brent. And inevitably, with diverted cargoes in fairly significant volumes to other markets, I think the inevitable is that Brent also falls. And so while there is the issue of clearing that differential that exists today with more and more pipe capacity into that Gulf Coast market, I think we're also going to see that there's ample opportunity for Bakken and Canadian crude in that market to displace foreign imports.
And as far as pricing goes, I think we'll watch. Differentials are funny things. But the market is very efficient at removing large arbitrages, and I think that's what you're going to see happen as we move these volumes there.
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