As U.S. Oil Glut Swells, Exxon Mobil Joins Race to Export Crude
By Sheela Tobben & Javier Blas, March 3, 2016 — 12:51 PM PST, Updated on March 4, 2016 — 3:41 AM PST
Exxon ships U.S. crude into its refinery in the Mediterranean
U.S. crude stockpiles have risen to their highest since 1930
Exxon Mobil Corp. has become the first major U.S. oil company to ship American crude overseas, joining a band of independent traders that are trying to ease a glut at home after a 40-year export ban was lifted.
Exxon shipped U.S. crude into a refinery it owns in Sicily, according to a person familiar with the matter and three traders and ship brokers. The Maran Sagitta oil tanker sailed in early February from Beaumont, Texas, where Exxon operates a refinery. It recently arrived in the Italian port of Augusta.
Until now, trading houses including Vitol Group BV and Trafigura Pte and European-based oil companies have shipped U.S. crude overseas. Exxon is the first American firm that joins the race, which comes as domestic U.S. crude inventories surge to the highest level in nearly 90 years.
“While we do not comment on the details of proprietary commercial agreements, crude exports from the U.S. are now another commercial option that we may elect to exercise from time to time,” Exxon said in an e-mailed statement.
Tracking the Maran Sagitta
The shipment is further evidence that U.S. oil exports are picking up, particularly into Europe, after a slow start two months ago. Enterprise Products Partners LP, one of the biggest operators of oil ports in the U.S., told investors this month it alone expected to handle exports of about 13 million barrels in the first quarter, equal to about 145,000 barrels a day. On top of Italy, traders and companies are exporting US crude to Venezuela, Germany, the Netherlands and Israel among other locations.
Oil traders are shipping West Texas Intermediate to refiners in the Mediterranean to profit from the difference in crude prices between the two regions. A glut of WTI has pushed up U.S. stockpiles to a record, depressing the price of the U.S. benchmark relative to European Brent crude.
The exports into Europe follow a congressional deal in December to lift a 1970s-era prohibition on overseas shipments and a movement in relative prices between the U.S. and Europe making exports profitable.
Open Arbitrage
“The arbitrage to European refiners for WTI loading promptly currently seems to be open,” Ben Luckock, global head of crude oil at Trafigura said on Feb 22. “A number of vessels of WTI crude oil have recently been fixed to Europe.”
The overseas sales could relieve pressure on storage capacity in the U.S., after stockpiles rose to nearly 518 million barrels last week, the highest level in official data going back to 1930. Inventories at the biggest U.S. oil storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma climbed to a record above 66 million barrels last week, according to the Energy Information Administration. The site, the delivery point for WTI, has a working capacity of 73 million.
Exxon, together with companies such as Chevron Corp. and Continental Resources Inc., have lobbied vigorously in recent years against the export ban, which blocked all but a fraction of U.S. oil overseas sales. They faced opposition from U.S. domestic refiners, including Valero Energy Corp., which feared the end of the export ban would lift domestic crude prices, undermining their margins.
The ban was imposed in the aftermath of a 1973 to 1974 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil embargo, which crippled the U.S. economy and brought home the heavy dependence the country had developed on foreign suppliers.
America’s decades-old crude oil export ban is under urgent threat of repeal through backroom dealing and an imminent vote on a congressional spending bill. The ban is a critical safeguard against climate change and the damages and risks of fracking.
Lifting the ban would massively boost oil production at a time when the science demands that we must leave at least 80 percent of remaining fossil fuels in the ground. The combustion of the additional oil that would be produced is estimated to generate more than515 million metric tons of carbon pollution per year — the equivalent annual greenhouse gas emissions of 135 coal-fired power plants or more than 100 million passenger cars.
If this horrendous bill passes, communities across America will face more pollution, illness and disruption from drilling and fracking. We can’t afford to lift the crude oil export ban just to contribute to Big Oil’s windfall profits.
Phone calls to your senators and the White House are urgently needed. Here are some talking points. Type in your ZIP code below to get your senators’ numbers, then let us know you called.
For senators:
Hi, my name is ______, and I live in ______. I’m calling to urge you to vote NO on the omnibus bill that repeals the crude oil export ban. Lifting the ban would increase oil production and damage from fracking and other dangerous drilling while undercutting progress fighting climate change. It will increase Big Oil’s profits at our expense. No deal could justify lifting the 40-year-old crude oil export ban.
Please — vote against any bill that lifts the crude oil export ban or has other sneak attacks on our environment and democracy.
Can you tell me how Senator X plans to vote? Thank you.
For the White House:
Hi, my name is ______, and I live in ______. I’m calling to urge you to veto the omnibus bill that repeals the crude oil export ban. Lifting the ban would increase oil production and damage from fracking and other dangerous drilling while undercutting progress fighting climate change. It will increase Big Oil’s profits at our expense. No deal could justify lifting the 40-year-old crude oil export ban.
Please veto any bill that lifts the crude oil export ban or has other sneak attacks on our environment and democracy.
OPINION | Jessie Mehrhoff, November 12, 2015 11:21 a.m. EST
(Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
It’s the fundamental connection between environmental degradation and human health that has me concerned about the prospect of Congress lifting the U.S. oil export ban, which will worsen climate change and threaten our communities with toxic spills.
The list of risks climate change poses to human health is long. Increased temperatures will spread tropical diseases to new latitudes. Heat waves will cause more deaths across the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to more health-threatening smog and decrease crop yields. Detailing these impacts and more in 2009, “The Lancet,” one of the world’s most respected medical journals, labeled climate change ‘the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
These aren’t just future consequences, to be experienced on the other side of the globe. In New Jersey, we still face the impacts of superstorm Sandy three years later. Climate scientists at Rutgers University predict even more extreme weather if climate change goes unchecked.
In addition to these consequences, the American Lung Association’s 2015 State of the Air report card has given Monmouth County an “F” for the number of high-ozone level days, and finds more than 56,000 people in the county suffer from asthma. Climate change is only going to make numbers such as this climb as our air quality worsens.
To avoid global warming’s most devastating health impacts, we must end our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to pollution-free, renewable energy. Lifting our decades-old ban on the export of U.S.-produced oil represents the opposite course.
If the oil companies have a larger distribution market for oil produced in the U.S., they will drill more — upward of another 3.3 million barrels per day for the next 20 years, by some General Accounting Office estimates. Even if only a fraction of all this extra oil is burned, global warming pollution could still increase 22 million metric tons per year — the equivalent of five average-sized coal power plants.
In addition to worsening climate change, there’s the public health threat of transporting additional oil across the country. While most crude oil is shipped around the U.S. by pipeline, shipments by rail have been increasing. To keep up with increased demand, oil trains have grown larger and tow more tanker cars than ever before.
Currently, trains carrying highly flammable crude oil travel through 11 of the 21 counties in New Jersey —Mercer, Middlesex, Gloucester, Somerset, Hunterdon, Bergen, Camden, Essex, Hudson, Union and Warren — en route to refineries. These oil trains are an accident waiting to happen, and have spurred trainings across the state where firefighters, police and other emergency responders have prepared courses of action in an oil derailment emergency.
The fear of oil train accidents — where toxic crude oil is spilled into our communities — is not hyperbole. Accidents have been on the rise, with more oil accidentally dumped into our environment in 2013 alone than during the previous three decades combined.
In 2015, we’ve already seen three major oil train accidents. In Mount Carbon, West Virginia, a rail oil spill led to evacuations and a governor-declared state of emergency. In Galena, Illinois, a spill threatened to pollute the Mississippi River. A spill in Heimdal, North Dakota, forced the evacuation of a town.
If we are to prevent these accidents from taking place in the 11 New Jersey counties through which these trains travel, we must work to reduce the amount of oil these trains carry. Transporting the increased oil we would produce domestically if the oil export ban were lifted could require enough trains to span the country from Los Angeles to Boston seven times over.
Increasing our nation’s crude oil drilling and transportation by lifting our decades’ old ban on exports leads to more risk, not less. And the inconvenient truth of lifting the oil export ban means more drilling, more global warming pollution, and more threats to public health.
There is a way around lifting the oil export ban in the first place. President Obama is against lifting the ban, and the measure only narrowly cleared a Senate committee earlier in the month. That’s why we need Sen. Cory Booker to join Sen. Bob Menendez in standing strong against the oil industry and to vote to keep the ban in place — for the sake of the environment and public health.
Jessie Mehrhoff is lead organizer with Environment New Jersey, a citizen-based environmental advocacy organization.
Repost from Crosscut, News of the Great Nearby [Editor: This is an excellent broad analysis of the intermingled risks of increasing rail, marine and pipeline delivery of North American crude to ports in the Pacific Northwest. Recommended reading. (Note that comments on increasing export of crude appear in the bulleted section, 9 paragraphs into the article.) Be sure to view the Friends of the Earth infographic showing regional impacts of multiple proposed fuel transport projects. – RS]
Guest Opinion: Dirty fuel exports darken NW’s Earth Day
By Fred Felleman, March 31, 2015
A refinery on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes (2008). Credit: 24hourmoon/Flickr
Some hailed President Barack Obama’s recent veto of the Keystone pipeline authorization legislation as an early Earth Day gift, spelling the project’s death knell. However, his decision was actually based on process, not policy. While Obama has articulated the science behind climate change better than any predecessor, his all-of-the-above energy strategy has opened the floodgates to unprecedented levels of domestic fossil fuel extraction with lax oversight.
These policies resulted in disasters such as BP’s indelible mark on the Gulf of Mexico five Earth Days ago. In typical fashion, regulators responded with some of the long-needed oversight, but offshore production soon came roaring back.
Recent oil train derailments, exposing communities to elevated risks, also reflect the administration’s policies in the face of the gusher of under-regulated fracked oil as it became cost-effective to bring to market by rail. While Bakken oil is the primary source of this incendiary risk, there are still only proposed national regulations on fracking without consideration of climate impacts. Despite the growing number of oil-train accidents, only weak requirements for safer tanker cars are being developed though Sen. Maria Cantwell just introduced legislation beginning to address this deficiency.
Leases are also being let on public lands at bargain-basement rates for coal extraction and risky Arctic oil exploration. Even after Shell Oil’s calamitous attempts to drill in the Chukchi Sea three years ago, resulting in eight felony convictions and $12.2 million in fines, the company is pursuing Arctic development this year.
Closer to home, Shell has secured the ability to use Terminal 5 from the Port of Seattle to maintain their oil rigs. This is yet another reflection of how the Northwest is being broadly targeted as the gateway for oil, coal and liquefied natural gas to Asian markets – all of which contribute unacceptable climate impacts.
Not since the late 1970s, when NW refineries switched from receiving crude oil from Alberta by pipeline to tankers from Alaska and elsewhere, have Washington’s waters and communities been exposed to such a growth in vessel casualties and oil spill risk. Despite the abandonment of four coal terminal proposals, there are still nearly 20 proposals for oil, coal, propane and LNG terminals either under review or recently permitted.
There is a major difference between the proactive safety planning that preceded the arrival of Alaskan oil tankers in the 1970s with the ad hoc gold-rush mentality that pervades today’s permit decisions.
The last time there was such a growing threat of catastrophic spills, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson took the lead in protecting the Sound from spills. He restricted the size and number of tankers transiting east of Port Angeles and worked on other national and local safety measures, like the 1978 Port and Tanker Safety Act and the creation of an international vessel traffic system in North America, enabling the Coast Guard to serve as ship traffic controllers in the Pacific Northwest. These measures lasted the test of time and continue to contribute to our admirable oil spill record – a legacy to endure. However, it is critical not to rest on our laurels especially since frequency of incidents and accidents are a far better indication of risk exposure than rare spills.
In contrast, today, while new risks accumulate, we see reductions being made in rail and marine safety measures, despite efforts by Sen. Cantwell and others. Such reductions include:
Rail companies are trying to negotiate with unions to reduce the number of crew from two to one required for the operation of 100-plus-car oil trains. The Federal Railroad Administration has not even defined the minimum crew size required for safe operations despite years of requests by the NTSB.
The Obama administration recently published clarification as to the seven ways in which domestically produced crude can be exported from the U.S. Despite this liberalization of exports, oil companies are pushing Congress for complete elimination of the longstanding ban on exports of U.S. oil.
The U.S. Army Corps asserted in the draft environmental impact statement, 10 years in the making, for the construction of BP’s second tanker dock at Cherry Point that the agency’s permit did not violate a Magnuson amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But the amendment seems to explicitly prohibit such actions. They have also yet to respond to the Lummi’s tribe call to abandon the Gateway coal project due to impacts to their treaty-protected rights.
The Washington State Pilotage Commission recently reduced the training required of pilots allowed to guide oil tankers in and out of Grays Harbor — despite growth in vessel traffic and three newly proposed oil terminals there.
Gov. Jay Inslee and local governments failed to require full environmental impact statements evaluating the chronic train and cumulative vessel impacts of the numerous oil terminal proposals prior to issuing permits. The only time such analysis has been required is in response to lawsuits. (An infographic was produced by Friends of the Earth and Protect Whatcom to visualize this increase associated with new terminals.)
One recent exercise of state authority was the Utilities and Trade Commission’s (UTC) fines against BNSF’s series of oil spills from oil trains calling on Washington. While such leadership is encouraging, in reality we don’t need their money as much as we need to be freed from their leaky oil trains. Similarly, on the marine front there is state legislation calling for tugs to escort the growing number of oil barges moving through Washington waters.
The combined vessel traffic currently bound to and from ports in Washington and British Columbia make the Strait of Juan de Fuca the second busiest waterway in North America.
While Washington’s regulatory agencies are overwhelmed by the onslaught of new terminal proposals and the fate of the Keystone pipeline nationally remains uncertain, there is a major threat coming from Canada to Washington and British Columbia’s Salish Sea. Former Enron executives acquired the Kinder Morgan pipeline that currently connects the vast Alberta tar sand reserves with a port near Vancouver, British Columbia. They are now seeking permits from Canada’s National Energy Board to triple its capacity, making it comparable in volume to the far better known Keystone proposal.
A spur in the Trans Mountain pipeline has also directly connected Washington’s four largest refineries in Whatcom and Skagit counties to Albertan oil since the 1950s. This helps explain why the refineries were constructed in the navigationally challenging waters through the San Juan Islands, rather than along the much broader Juan de Fuca Strait.
This expansion would result in a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic transiting through the San Juan Islands and the core area of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale community. The tankers would go from about one per week to one per day. Researchers at the George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University calculated this would result in a 51 percent increase in the amount of oil transported through the Salish Sea and increases in the risks of oil spills from collisions and groundings.
Tar Sands pose unique challenges to the response community. In order to get the heavy bitumen produced in Alberta to flow into pipelines, rail cars and tankers, it needs to be mixed with highly volatile diluents. This mixture, known as dilbit, has been shown to be explosive during accidents. And, during spills, the evaporation of volatile vapors poses health risks to responders, while the heavy remainders sink in water, complicating clean-up efforts.
Despite risks of Trans Mountain’s proposed expansion to the Salish Sea, the U.S. Coast Guard has been reluctant to release incident data in these boundary waters, claiming that is up to Canada – including when incidents occurred in U.S. waters. The lack of this data has underrepresented the vessel casualty risk in the analysis conducted for several terminal proposals.
Building a cross-Cascades pipeline to bring Alaskan oil to the Rocky Mountain states was part of the original plan to construct the state’s largest refinery (ARCO, now BP Cherry Point) north of Bellingham in the 1970s. This would have significantly increased the number of tankers calling on our waters that Magnuson’s efforts successfully thwarted. Now there is state legislation introduced to study sending oil over the cascades in the other direction, thereby connecting Washington refineries to Midwest oil. A recent series of major pipeline leaks has demonstrated how regulations have also lagged behind this oft-touted safest form of oil transportation. Since 2012, according the AP, 50 pipelines have been constructed – adding 3.3 million barrels of daily pipeline capacity, dwarfing Keystone’s 800,000. Between 2004 and 2012, U.S. pipelines spilled three times as much crude as oil trains.
As restrictions on the export of domestic oil are lifted, any purported benefits of pipelines will be quickly eclipsed by the risks associated with the increased volumes of oil being shipped overseas.
Based on statements in the President’s State of the Union address calling on Congress to send him something more than just a pipeline bill, it appears that he is willing to horse trade the completion of the Keystone pipeline for Republican support of his other priority infrastructure projects. Regardless, the uncertainty about Keystone has only emboldened Kinder Morgan to influence Canadian government decision-makers to get one of the world’s largest, most destructive and energy inefficient oil sources to international markets, risking the Salish Sea waters Washington shares with Canada.
As we look toward Earth Day, it’s sobering to remember the failures of oil shipment policies the country has seen. It was 26 years ago last week (March 24) that the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of North Slope crude into the biological oasis of Prince William Sound. After that, Congress finally required tankers to be double hulled. It took until this year to complete the phase out of all single-hulled tankers, each carrying up to 33 million gallons of crude through Washington waters. One of Magnuson’s last actions was to write to Congress on his deathbed following Exxon’s abject failure to prevent or respond to their despoiling of Prince William Sound, calling on that body to require double hulls for oil tankers.
Obama’s priority trade deal, the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), will require compensating fossil fuel extractors for potential lost revenues if they are required to “keep it in the ground.” This subsidy undermines an essential step for combating catastrophic climate impacts.
The great legacy, from Magnuson and others, of protecting of Puget Sound is under threat. We need stronger local, state and congressional leadership on energy and the environment. And we need our next president to redefine an “all of the above” energy policy into one that transfers subsidies from peddlers of fossil fuel to peddlers of bicycles and for energy truly coming from above, such as wind and solar power. Otherwise, our children will lose the benefits of the natural capital we are jeopardizing by our lack of long-term vision.
