Sounds like not such a bad problem to have. Will the Obama administration will jump in to make sure the needed pipeline construction is not hampered by government red tape?
http://streamingradioguide.com/startingover/?p=2588The Problem With Cushing Oklahoma
...Canada is producing large amounts of oil and they have reversed a pipeline to carry oil to Cushing – but Cushing is a small place in the middle of nowhere. The tanks are full and there isn’t enough outbound capacity to send the oil anywhere.
With a glut in Oklahoma, that depresses the “benchmark” price – to the point the Saudis declared they no longer will sell their oil based in US prices, but based on North Sea oil.
So pretend you run a refinery in Houston and you have the choice of buying Cushing Oil from Canada @ $85 a barrel or Saudi oil at $121 a barrel (almost $1 a gallon cheaper? The answer is you can’t get there from here. Several companies want to build a new pipeline, but they are scared of the US government interfering for political reasons, and concern that some day Canada might lose interest in selling oil to Texas....
Even if it is built, 2013 is the earliest it could be running.
So what are your options?
Truck? - Cushing is about half way between Tulsa (on the East) and Oklahoma City. The nearest interstate highway is 15 miles away. According to Google Maps, the trip from Cushing to Houston is about 511 miles, and takes about 9 hours. Your truck is going to be returning empty. So a driver going back and forth is maybe going to be about to do 4 trips a week. The cost to ship crude by truck is a bit over $2 a mile – so each round trip for the truck costs around $2,500. A truck can hold about 200 barrels of oil – so that option costs about $12 a barrel – except there aren’t 1000s of idle tanker trucks sitting around. Canada is sending about a million barrels a day, which would mean you would need 5000 trucks a day making the round trip.
Barge? – Sorry, Cushing is nowhere near a river
Train? – Sorry – the nearest rail line is 35 miles away.
Tulsa has significant refining capacity and you can run trucks back and forth – but Tulsa is not on the main finished products (gasoline / Jet fuel) pipelines that are in Houston – so once you make it into gasoline, you still have to move it somewhere that can use it.