Facility is running mainly on crude oil
Canada’s Come by Chance refinery, on the far eastern tip of the country, has swapped out its mainstay Iraqi crude to run almost wholly on U.S. shale oil, industry sources say, the latest sign of how the shale boom is redrawing global oil trade.
Some two months after South Korea’s national energy firm agreed to sell the refinery to a newly formed New York-based commodities group, the 115,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) plant in Newfoundland has already begun making significant changes in its crude oil diet, according to two sources familiar with its operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Today, the facility is running mainly on crude oil being shipped out of Texas, according to the sources as well as shipping data compiled by Thomson Reuters. That is a big switch from the first nine months of the year, when over 70 percent of its feedstock was coming from Iraq, data show.
The switch at Come by Chance – a town named for its remoteness on the island of Newfoundland – is the most dramatic sign yet of how a growing bounty of light, sweet U.S. shale oil is displacing other producers in refineries worldwide.
While rapidly rising North American production has already squeezed out imports across most of the U.S. Gulf and East coasts, and some of Canada, the Come by Chance refinery is the furthest-flung plant to make such a major switch, suggesting that cheaper domestic prices are compensating for higher freight costs.

