Bakken Oil Arriving On East Coast By Rail And Barge

PBF has a 190,000 bopd refinery in Delaware City; some of that oil is coming from the Bakken. I can't remember if I posted the earlier stories, but a reader sent me an update. Here are some older stories; the update suggested that everything seems to be moving on schedule.

Older stories:

Bloomerberg reported, Feb 4, 2013:

PBF finished construction of the second train unloading terminal at its Delaware City refinery, boosting total crude-by-rail capacity to 110,000 barrels a day.

PBF expects to unload its first unit train of Bakken oil this week, with 17 more scheduled to arrive in the next two weeks, the company said today in a statement. The 182,200- barrel-a-day refinery can take 40,000 barrels a day of heavy crude by rail and 70,000 barrels of light. 

PBF, based in Parsippany, New Jersey, is trying to tap into the glut of oil stranded in Canada and the U.S. Midwest as production growth has outpaced pipeline capacity, depressing prices relative to Brent, the benchmark crude for Atlantic refiners. 

BloombergBusinessWeek reported, Feb 6, 2013:

The biggest challenge to fixing this problem, and connecting supply with demand, is getting some of North Dakota’s Bakken oil into the densely populated East Coast market. Building a 1,500-mile pipeline from North Dakota to New York would be the straightest way, but that’s not happening anytime soon. Which means that oil is moving east any way it can—by train, by barge, even by truck.

While some Bakken barrels have started arriving on the East Coast, a whole lot more are on their way in 2013. A number of projects scheduled to finish this year will more than double the amount of Bakken crude that finds its way to the East Coast, from about 300,000 barrels per day to more than 800,000, according to Eric Lee, an oil analyst at Citigroup.

One of the first projects came online this week in Delaware. PBF Energy announced on Monday that it’s completed a rail terminal that will take delivery of about 110,000 barrels a day of Bakken crude. PBF says it expects to unload its first train filled with Bakken crude later this week. That oil will go directly into its Delaware City refinery outside Wilmington. A $68 million project outside Philadelphia is turning the site of a shuttered coal plant into a rail terminal that’ll be able to take delivery of about 80,000 barrels of oil per day by this fall. That oil, mostly from the Bakken, will then get barged up to refineries along the Delaware River and even into New York Harbor.

Greenpeace is against it, of course. Photographs at the linked site suggest many protestors arrived by gasoline-powered SUVs.