Huge Article in The Washington Post -- Bakken Oil To East Coast Refinery

Five-page (internet) article. Link here to The Washington Post.

When you get to the article, count the number of times the Bakken is referenced. This article could have been written by a Bakken enthusiast.

Gradually, just gradually, the "Bakken" is becoming a household word.

There are a number of story lines in this article. The involvement of President Obama and his EPA are at least three story lines.

Rinaldi is working for Carlyle Group, the Washington-based private equity firm that earlier this year acquired about a two-thirds interest in this imperiled oil refinery, whose history dates to 1866. The day after Labor Day 2011, Sunoco had announced it would shut down the plant as part of a strategy to exit its refining business, where the company had lost about $800 million over three years.

What did Carlyle see? Opportunity, said Rinaldi, and a chance to turn it around by tapping energy resources that even a year earlier weren’t readily available: cheap Pennsylvania shale gas and growing supplies of North Dakota shale oil. The private equity firm’s commitment to invest and pursue those supplies has saved about 850 jobs at the south Philadelphia refinery and transform it into a hub of rejuvenated industry.

The story leads with this:

Phil Rinaldi looked out the window of a company car at the sprawling oil refinery that straddles the Schuykill River. The property covers an area nearly twice the size of New York City’s Central Park, and it is home to clusters of pipes, processing towers and storage tanks along with big stretches of empty dirt.

The site, situated next to a baseball field, is what Rinaldi calls his own “field of dreams” where he hopes to build a high-speed railroad terminal to unload shale oil and a power plant that would run on shale gas. And he believes that both of those will lure new industrial companies here to help build up what the oil company Sunoco had until recently planned to close down.

I believe this refinery is separate and distinct from the refinery that Delta bought from COP, the Trainer refinery, but I could be wrong. 

It's an incredibly interesting "back" story; long, fairly in-depth.

Again, count the number of times the Bakken is referenced, and the Obama/EPA story lines.