To: Bonefish who wrote (1581755 ) 1/7/2026 11:52:29 AM From: combjelly 6 RecommendationsRecommended By
Read Replies (3) | Respond to Our Gulf coast refineries are designed to handle heavy crude. Nope. Now a lot of them were upgraded designed to handle light, sweet crude that is common in the area. But that was getting pricey compared to heavy, sour crude that had become more common by that time. Since all of the pipes and conduits linking the various unit had to be replaced anyway, a lot of the bigger ones took the opportunity to expand their capabilities. The refineries had a lot of free space already permitted in the form of the no longer needed parking lots. Over the decades, automation had wiped out the vast majority of workers, resulting in huge parking lots with a small cluster of pickups around the entrance. And yes, you can dilute heavier crudes like you do with bitumen, aka shale oil. But you still have the sulfur to deal with. Which is an additional cost. It isn't an insurmountable one, but refineries operate in a high volume, low-margin environment for most of their products. And that means refineries are usually optimized for crude with a narrow range of parameters to produce certain products. Now most any refinery can take any crude and produce any product within limits. Whether they can do it profitably or not is the question. So you can't really have a refinery optimised for light,sweet crude to produce gasoline and switch it to diluted bitumen(dilbit) and expect it to have the same level of production. It probably doesn't have enough sulfur scrubbers and it would need more and/or different catalytic cracking units to do that.
