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.