Locator: 49880B.
Oracle: shares up!
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $62.06.
New wells reporting:
- Tuesday, February 3, 2026: 6 for the month, 59 for the quarter, 59 for the year,
- 41959, conf, Petro-Hunt, State 162-100-16B-21-2H,
- 41352, conf, Hess, GO-Beck Living TR-156-98-2017H-3,
- 39807, conf, BR, Mazama 1C,
- Monday, February 2, 2026: 3 for the month, 56 for the quarter, 56 for the year,
- 41290, conf, Hess, GO-Morgan-LW-156-97-1806H-1,
- Sunday, February 1, 2026: 2 for the month, 55 for the quarter, 55 for the year,
- 42133, conf, WGO Resources, Trester 1-21,
- 42032, conf, Slawson, Rebel Federal 4-32-17TFH,
- Saturday, January 31, 2026: 53 for the month, 53 for the quarter, 53 for the year,
- 41997, conf, Slawson, Rebel Federal 2-32-17H,
- 39806, conf, BR, Mazama 1B,
RBN Energy: a big push is on to pipe more PADD2 refined products east to PADD 1. Link here. Archived.
For the past several years, a potent combination of market developments has incentivized PADD 2/Midwest refiners — and their midstream partners — to move increasing volumes of gasoline and diesel east into Pennsylvania and other states in the Northeast. The limiting factors have been eastbound pipeline capacity and the concerns PADD 1/East Coast refiners have expressed to regulators about the potentially negative impacts of the shift in product flows. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss what’s been happening lately on this front and how it’s affecting refiners.
We’ll start with a brief, big-picture review of refining and refined-product flows in the Midwest and Northeast. Since 2000, there’s been a substantive buildup in refining capacity in PADD 2 — a 17% gain in overall capacity and a 33% increase in delayed coking capacity. This has been driven primarily by the growing availability of favorably priced heavy sour crude being piped in from Western Canada. The Midwest now has more than 4.2 MMb/d of refining capacity, including 1.5 MMb/d in the four PADD 2 states closest to PADD 1 (Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio), and produces more refined products than it consumes. Over the same 25-year period, refining capacity in the Northeast (almost all of it in Delaware, New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania) has fallen by half, to about 800 Mb/d. Most of the decline in PADD 1 refining can be tied to economics — including the lack of pipeline access to U.S. shale oil — but part of it is due to events, such as the devastating June 2019 fire at Philadelphia Energy Solutions’ 330-Mb/d refinery in Philadelphia, which led the facility’s owner to shut it down.
The fall-off in PADD 1 refining capacity has increased the Northeast’s reliance on gasoline and diesel that is shipped in from elsewhere — waterborne imports for sure, but also piped-in volumes from refineries in PADD 2 and PADD 3/Gulf Coast. While Gulf Coast refineries have provided the majority of these domestic movements, the economics of making refined products in the eastern Midwest and piping them east into PADD 1 are becoming more compelling.
Over the past 15 years, several refineries in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio made significant investments in the delayed cokers and other equipment that enable them to break down price-discounted low-API, high-sulfur Canadian crude into valuable refined products. Much of the time, the cost of making those products and piping them east into the Northeast is lower than the cost PADD 1 refiners and other suppliers there can offer — sometimes considerably so, especially for gasoline. Also contributing to these economics is the trend toward an overall surplus of refined products in PADD 2 as in-region demand stagnates and refiners look to new markets. (Note: A detailed forecast of regional supply/demand and resulting inter-regional product flows through 2050 is included in RBN’s latest Future of Fuels report, which will be coming out in early February.)
But while that “arb” encourages the eastbound movement of Midwest-sourced refined products into PADD 1, those flows are limited not just by the capacity of the eastbound pipes but also by how far east the flows can go.
