Buckeye will convert a New York rail facility to refined products service after a customer terminated a contract for crude movements through the facility.
Work was underway to change the Albany facility to allow shippers to move refined products from the midcontinent to the east coast. The facility previously received railed crude deliveries that were loaded onto vessels for waterborne movements. Tankers until last November made almost weekly runs from the facility to Irving Oil's 300,000 b/d St John, New Brunswick, refinery.
The proposed railed refined product movement would be unusual and another encroachment of midcontinent production into a region dominated by US Gulf coast, imported and local refined fuels.
Buckeye completed mechanical changes to allow deliveries from Ohio and Michigan into western Pennsylvania during the third quarter. Deliveries across that system will begin early next year.
The company received sufficient 10-year commitments to move forward on a second phase of the project, which will in 2018 move products further east into central Pennsylvania through a reversed portion of the Buckeye's Laurel pipeline.
Buckeye also began a project to allow east coast refiners who currently serve central Pennsylvania access to alternative markets in upstate New York and the New York Harbor.
