Cushing has done it again! The all-important hub in central Oklahoma is once more broadening the range of crude oils it handles, this time by figuring out how to receive and blend the quirkiest of domestic oils: yellow wax crude from Utah’s Uinta Basin. Better still, the blending can create a fully compliant Domestic Sweet (DSW), the crude quality deliverable on the CME/NYMEX futures contract usually referenced as West Texas Intermediate (WTI). In today’s RBN blog, we discuss how it works and what it means for Uinta producers, waxy crude marketers, refiners and Cushing itself.
To truly understand Cushing — what it does and how it works — you need to know the hub’s assets and how they fit together. RBN’s Cushing Crude Oil Playbook provides the first one-stop, comprehensive guide to the hub’s assets.
Production of the Uinta Basin’s medium-API-gravity, low-sulfur but super-waxy crude oil continues to rise — and now far exceeds the volumes Salt Lake City’s specially configured nearby refineries can use — but the high paraffin content of both the black and yellow varieties make them particularly challenging to transport and unload. Uinta E&Ps in northeastern Utah know the drill on local deliveries: Keep the stuff hot and in a liquid state, load it up hot into insulated tanker trucks and drive ‘em two and a half hours west/northwest to the five refineries in and around Salt Lake City. The same works for delivering Uinta waxy crude to the Wildcat and Price River truck-to-rail terminals (red stars in Figure 1 below) two hours south/southwest of the basin. Once it’s loaded into unit trains of rail tank cars there, waxy crude is railed down to a handful of refineries with the heated tankage and other specialized equipment needed to unload it, store it and blend it into the refineries‘ crude slates — and the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) units that can break it down into desirable products.
The catch is, the five Salt Lake City-area refineries used to receiving waxy crude already are taking all the supplies they can handle and only a few refineries elsewhere — Motiva’s in Port Arthur, TX, and ExxonMobil’s in Baton Rouge among them (black dots in lower-right) — have the required equipment and heated storage needed to handle waxy crude. To put it simply, to support increased production, Uinta E&Ps need to find new demand.
Figure 1. Railing Uinta Waxy Crude to Gulf Coast Refineries — and Now Cushing. Source: RBN
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About the song
“Yellow” was written by Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman and Will Champion. It appears as the fifth song on Coldplay’s debut album, Parachutes. The song was released as the second single from the album in June 2000 and went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart and has been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Personnel on the record were: Chris Martin (lead vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboards), Jonny Buckland (electric guitar), Guy Berryman (bass), and Will Champion (drums, percussion, backing vocals).
Parachutes was recorded between the summer of 1999 and the spring of 2000 at Rockfield in Wales and Matrix, Wessex, Parr Street and Orinoco in London with Ken Nelson, Chris Allison, and Coldplay producing. It is worth noting that Rockfield in Wales is a no-frills, organic studio known for its ”room sound” with stone walls and wooden ceilings. Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Foghat, Queen, Oasis, Robert Plant, Simple Minds, and Coldplay are just a few of its past clients. Parachutes was released in November 2000 and went to #1 on the U.K. charts and #51 on the Billboard 200 Albums charts. It has been certified 2X Platinum by the RIAA. Four singles were released from the LP.
Coldplay is a British rock band formed in London in 1997 by Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman, Will Champion, and manager Phil Harvey. They released their first EP, Safety, independently in 1988 before signing a record deal with Parlophone Records in 1999. They have released 10 studio albums, six live albums, 12 compilation albums, 18 EPs, and 44 singles and have sold more than 100 million records worldwide. Coldplay has won two American Music Awards, 10 ASCAP Music Awards, nine Brit Awards, seven Grammy Awards, five Ivor Novello Awards, seven MTV Video Music Awards, and four World Music Awards. The band continues to record and tour and will be playing Middle Eastern dates in January 2025 and Asian dates in April 2025.
