From XOM Earnings Call, Killing The Keystone, Rail, Plan B
"Anon 1" alerted me to
this Q&A in the XOM earnings call:
...my second question, it really relates to the use of rail for oil
movement in North America. And I know that Exxon has a large existing
railcar fleet, a diversified and growing liquid footprint. I also read a
report recently that Exxon's placed a significant railcar order
recently. And so I just wondering do you see rail as a potential
solution for taking [ph] barrel production in the event maybe the
Keystone is delayed or denied, or if you have other kind of specified or
a contemplated use for rail as a bit more permanent solution for oil
movement in North America.
David S. Rosenthal - Vice President of Investor Relations and Secretary: That's
an all-encompassing question, so I'll probably step back here for just a
second and put it in perspective. First of all, with relation -- or
with regard to the Kearl project, we have worked all of the logistics
out and we can place all of our barrels and we have the capability to
run all those barrels in our own refineries for that first 110,000
barrels a day.
We may elect to put some into third-party refineries, but
we do not have an issue in terms of logistics, moving those barrels out
of the Kearl project and into the market. As you look a little more
broadly, both at the Canadian heavy crude as well as a lot of the crudes
such as Bakken, until pipelines are built and some of the things that
you mentioned actually come to fruition, there are, today, some
bottlenecks across the industry and there's a lot of different modes of
transportation being used to move that product to market, of which
railcar is certainly one of them, waiting for some of these pipelines to
come in.
As you mentioned, we have -- or as you would expect with the size of our business, we have a very
large fleet of rail cars, both across all of our businesses, and so that
is already a primary mode of transportation for us. We're always
looking at that. We're always looking at the logistics and how we can
optimize both the placement of our production into the market as well as
obtaining advantaged feedstocks for our refining circuit. And so that
is an ongoing effort, and there's nothing unusual in that.
In regards to
the rumor that you heard, I would just say that's a rumor. I wouldn't
have a comment on it specifically, but I can say there's nothing out of
the ordinary in terms of what our organization, our supply organization
is working on, again, getting our crudes to market for the best value
and getting the lowest cost advantaged feedstocks into our refineries
and chemical plants.
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