A cargo of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve headed to California this month for the first time ever, ship tracking service Kpler said.
The unusual movement highlights the redrawing of trade flows and shipping routes as the Iran war has cut off supplies of Middle Eastern crude. California, once a top oil-producing state in the U.S., has in recent years become more dependent on crude imports, including about 230,000 barrels per day last year from the Middle East. Availability of alternative crude oil is also limited due to competing demand from Asia.
About 460,000 barrels of Bayou Choctaw Sweet crude headed to Chevron’s Richmond refinery in California, while another 50,000 barrels of the same grade discharged at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery, Kpler said, citing bills of lading.
Tanker Red Moon had loaded nearly 980,000 barrels of Bayou Choctaw Sweet in Louisiana, according to Kpler, and discharged the cargo at the Atlantic Terminal on the east coast of Panama in early May. Chevron was listed as the seller of the cargo, according to Kpler.
A 131 km (81.4 miles) pipeline can transport crude oil from the east coast to the Pacific Terminal on the west coast of Panama.
Supertanker Pascagoula Voyager, chartered by Chevron, loaded about 2 million barrels of crude at the Pacific Terminal and headed to the U.S. West Coast, the ship tracking service said. The vessel was co-loaded with Guyana’s Unity Gold crude oil.
The supertanker unloaded the strategic petroleum reserve crude to two smaller ships that took the cargoes to the refineries in California, Kpler said.
Chevron did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The company said in May that it used the Jones Act waiver to move crude from the Gulf Coast around to the West Coast.
(Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston Editing by Tomasz Janowski)