An oil sands company says it’s finished its first shipment of bitumen to Mississippi using rail instead of pipelines.
Southern Pacific Resource Corporation says it sent forty-two hundred barrels from CN’s Lynton rail yard south of Fort McMurray on the 22nd.
It arrived in Natchez, Mississippi on Sunday – a forty-five hundred kilometre journey.
The oil will then be put onto barges to get to refineries.
The bitumen came from its STP-McKay thermal project, which is expected to ramp up from twelve-hundred barrels per day now to twelve thousand next year.
By using the railway, Southern Pacific can avoid the bottlenecks in pipelines in the northern U.S.
January 8th, 2013