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Delta interested in buying an oil refinery?

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Just an update from CNBC I just saw:


Looks like IF this refinery happens, Delta would team up with JP Morgan. JP Morgan would buy the crude from Nigeria, ship it over to the refinery that Delta would supposedly buy. Delta would refine the crude, but JP Morgan would take most of the risk on the crude, and sell back to Delta only the Jet A (about 12% per barrel?) at WHOLESALE. Then JP Morgan would take all the rest of the refined barrel and sell it on the open market.

Sounds smart, eh? Apparently the oil guy who Delta has now working for them used to work at Connoco Philips, the people who are selling the refinery, so he has intimate knowledge of the people and process.


Here is the video clip:


Click here: Inside Delta, JPMorgan Deal



Any comments from SWA GUY or Redflyer? Full Steam ahead Red!


Godspeed!


The OYSter
 
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Looks like On Your Lee is right. Deal for refinery to be signed tomorrow.

The joke is that one company in a money losing industry wants to get involved in another money losing industry. I must this is going to be very interesting to watch.

The problem is, they will still need to get the right crude to that refinery. I'm thinking they might buy tankers, or better yet riverboats.

Full Steam Ahead.
 
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Looks like On Your Lee is right. Deal for refinery to be signed tomorrow.

The joke is that one company in a money losing industry wants to get involved in another money losing industry. I must this is going to be very interesting to watch.

The problem is, they will still need to get the right crude to that refinery. I'm thinking they might buy tankers, or better yet riverboats.

Full Steam Ahead.

Wonder if we can get displaced to the tanker?
 
Details of the deal.



In its next step to address rising fuel costs, Delta Monday afternoon said it has an agreement to acquire the Trainer oil refinery south of Philadelphia. Delta subsidiary Monroe Energy LLC will operate the plant independently from Delta, converting the plant to maximize jet fuel production to supply Delta’s Northeast operations.


“Today’s announcement is an innovative step that will help us reduce the impact that fuel has on our business,” Richard said in a memo to employees. “This investment is one among many strategic actions we are taking to address our fuel costs and make Delta stronger, more resilient and more profitable. Improved profitability allows for additional investment in our product, greater returns for our shareholders and higher profit sharing for Delta people.”



Delta will enter into multi-year agreements with Phillips 66 and with BP to source crude oil for the Trainer facility as well as exchange nonjet fuel byproducts of the refining process in exchange for more jet fuel throughout the country.


The refinery acquisition will save Delta $300 million a year by not having to pay the premium required to convert or “crack” crude oil into jet fuel instead of other petroleum products, such as gasoline. Delta paid $3 billion more for fuel last year than it did in 2010, and of that amount $1 billion was reflected in the additional cost attributed to what analysts call the “crack spread.”


This acquisition and the exchange agreements to swap refinery byproducts for more jet fuel around the nation will combine to supply 80% of Delta’s domestic jet fuel needs.


After using a $30 million grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Delta will invest $150 million to buy Trainer from Phillips 66. Delta will spend approximately $100 million to improve the refinery and maximize its jet fuel production, which will feed Delta’s operations in New York and around the region.


“In the face of historically high fuel prices we’ve taken a number of steps to control costs since 2008 including creating an integrated fuel team, retiring less-fuel efficient planes, installing winglets, strictly managing capacity, using fuel hedges and pricing our tickets to reflect the cost of fuel,” Richard said. “But the reality is that crack spreads are the fastest growing part of our cost structure, more than tripling over the last three years.”


Delta’s fuel bill in 2011 was more than $12 billion, its largest single expense. The company’s hedging strategy and careful capacity planning are aimed at making sure higher fuel costs don’t threaten Delta’s sustainability.


“We expect the Trainer acquisition to be accretive to Delta’s earnings, expand our margins, and to fully recover our investment in the first year of operations,” said Paul Jacobson, s.v.p. and chief financial officer, in Delta’s press release. “We look forward to closing this transaction and moving quickly to begin capturing its benefits.”
The acquisition creates about 400 Monroe Energy jobs to operate the Trainer plant. The deal is expected to close in early summer, with the facility expected to be modified and producing more jet fuel later this year. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is offering grant assistance to lower the cost of acquiring the plant.
 
Red,

I think they announced it today, rather than tomorrow. Here was an article I found last night. You may want to read it. Delta thinks this will save them $300 million per year. So, if that is true, year two and beyond will be really good for the airline....


Analysis: Delta's refinery bid looks better on second glance


By Janet McGurty

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Delta Air Lines expected bid to buy a Pennsylvania oil refinery has had people in both industries joking that a company from the money-losing airline sector would be right at home in the money-losing world of East Coast refining.
But with the deal to buy ConocoPhillips' Trainer, Pennsylvania, refinery expected to be confirmed imminently, some say that Delta, the country's No. 2 carrier, could have the last laugh.

Airlines, after all, know a thing or two about managing high-risk, logistics-intensive industries through a slump. While Delta would be the first airline to buy into the sector, other end-users from Midwest farmers to steel companies have invested in the past; more recently, private equity firms have moved in.

Others say the deal is a defensive one, necessary to help prevent a run-up in fuel costs: the only other bidders for the plant wanted to shut it down and run it as a terminal, a move that could have reduced East Coast jet fuel supplies by more than a fifth and forced Delta to pay more for imports.
And while news of the bid surfaced only a month ago, it doesn't seem to be a hasty decision. Delta sent a team of experienced refinery specialists to examine the plant, which has refining capacity of 185,000 barrels a day, as early as last November, several sources familiar with the deal told Reuters. It established its bidding vehicle Monroe Energy LLC on December 13, 2011, according to Delaware records.

"It is an opportunity risk that Delta faces versus a negative risk exposure," says Geary Sikich, principal of Indiana-based Logical Management Systems, which specializes in assessing business risk and which has helped produce risk-modeling plans for major U.S. refiners.

JP Morgan's involvement in the bid as financier and designated oil trader also raised some eyebrows, yet to many makes good sense. Not only has the bank become the biggest energy derivatives trader on Wall Street, but the refinery's proximity to New York Harbor - the pricing point for gasoline and heating oil futures - makes it especially enticing.

Several sources who have participated in the discussions expect the deal to be announced early next week, around the time of the May 1 spin-off of ConocoPhillips' refining arm into a separate company called Phillips 66.
Under the expected terms, Delta would purchase the refinery for around $150 million - about the cost of a new wide-body jet - and JP Morgan's commodities team would finance the refining process, including buying crude and selling fuel.

Both company have declined to comment on the discussions.


INDUSTRIES IN CRISIS


To be sure, it is a risky bet brought on by dueling crises in both industries.
Rising fuel prices pushed major U.S. airlines into the red for the first quarter of 2012 and could continue to put pressure on results during the peak travel season.

East Coast refining has also been pushed to the brink of insolvency, with a quarter of the region's initial 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) of capacity already shut down, according to U.S. government data. Trainer, which has been idle since last year, is one of three refineries in the Philadelphia area that will be permanently shut if buyers aren't found.

Margins have been slammed by the converging pressures of high-cost imported crude oil feedstock, dwindling local fuel demand and heavy competition from new, modern plants in India, and Midwest rivals gorging on a surge in Canadian and North Dakota inland oil, trading at unprecedented discounts.

Simply owning a refinery would not protect Delta from rising crude oil prices. A penny saved buying at-cost jet fuel from the refinery would be one penny less Delta would earn at the plant, which would be paying market prices for its feedstock.

But there is a strategic dimension.


In 2010, more than 61,000 Delta flights departed from the three major New York-area airports, more than any carrier apart from Continental, according to government data. The hub accounts for 7 percent of Delta's U.S.-based flights. And Delta has just expanded service from LaGuardia and is spending $1.2 billion on a major overhaul of its facilities at JFK.


Shutting Trainer could jeopardize supply from a plant that is configured to produce about twice as much jet fuel as the average East Coast plant, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. It has the capacity to produce some 23,000 bpd of jet kerosene, more than 20 percent of the region's total.

Plus, keeping the plant running would give Delta more control over its own supply chain and, more importantly, could stave off the cost of importing fuel by tanker from Europe or the Gulf.

It now costs about 6 cents a gallon to ship clean fuel from Europe to Philadelphia. That could potentially add another 2 percent to Delta's fuel bill, which totaled more than $12 billion last year, when it consumed some 3.86 billion gallons or just over 250,000 barrels per day of jet fuel globally.
Last year, Delta paid an average of $3.06 a gallon, up nearly a third from 2010. For 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy forecasts the cost of jet fuel to average $3.35 a gallon.

Key to the venture's success would be tempering feedstock costs. In 2010, the last year in which Trainer was fully operating, it imported 175,000 barrels per day of crude, 75 percent of which was costly sweet crude from African producers including Nigeria, Angola and Algeria. Only 20 percent was relatively cheaper crude from Canada.
The new owners intend to change that by hauling some of the cut-price crude from North Dakota overland by train to Albany, New York, where it will be trucked or barged down to the Philadelphia region, according to sources involved in the talks. There are no pipelines to carry the crude directly.

"This will be a key part of the East Coast refining industry going forward. Finding a way to take the growing midcontinent crude and move it to the East Coast makes it a midstream solution," said one industry source with knowledge of the deal. Light, sweet Bakken crude has recently has been trading at least a $20 discount to Brent crude, the benchmark for almost all oil produced in Europe and West Africa.


Apart from the obvious risks associated with operating a vast, volatile industrial facility, the danger now is that other East Coast plants may also be pulled back from the brink, plunging profit margins into the red.
"This is a jet gamble versus a gasoline gamble," said a source familiar with the deal.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS


JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Morgan Stanley (MS.N) have tied into deals with smaller refiners in the United States, including Alon (ALJ.N), Northern Tier and PBF Energy, firms that would otherwise lack the scale to trade efficiently.

The Trainer arrangement has a special allure thanks to its proximity to New York Harbor, offering JP Morgan's oil traders the ability to more closely manage the jet fuel, diesel and gasoline hedges based on the U.S. RBOB gasoline and heating oil futures, which are settled with barrels delivered to the storage tanks in the harbor.

Such supply-and-offtake deals among independent refiners have allowed many such plants to stay open after integrated oil companies started to exit refining, according to an IHS CERA report in February that was commissioned by Morgan Stanley.

Whatever comes, one thing is assured: scrutiny.


"If it doesn't go well, it will get so much more attention than it probably deserves," says Raymond James airlines analyst Savanthi Syth. "But if it goes well, they'll be heroes."

(Additional reporting by Karen Jacobs in Atlanta and Tom Hals in Wilmington; Editing by Leslie Adler


(two paragraphs were deleted because the whole article was over 1000 characters and could not be squeezed in to this space)




Bye Bye---General Lee
 
Looks like On Your Lee is right. Deal for refinery to be signed tomorrow.

The joke is that one company in a money losing industry wants to get involved in another money losing industry. I must this is going to be very interesting to watch.

The problem is, they will still need to get the right crude to that refinery. I'm thinking they might buy tankers, or better yet riverboats.

Full Steam Ahead.


From the article (analysis) Red,



Key to the venture's success would be tempering feedstock costs. In 2010, the last year in which Trainer was fully operating, it imported 175,000 barrels per day of crude, 75 percent of which was costly sweet crude from African producers including Nigeria, Angola and Algeria. Only 20 percent was relatively cheaper crude from Canada.
The new owners intend to change that by hauling some of the cut-price crude from North Dakota overland by train to Albany, New York, where it will be trucked or barged down to the Philadelphia region, according to sources involved in the talks. There are no pipelines to carry the crude directly.


"This will be a key part of the East Coast refining industry going forward. Finding a way to take the growing midcontinent crude and move it to the East Coast makes it a midstream solution," said one industry source with knowledge of the deal. Light, sweet Bakken crude has recently has been trading at least a $20 discount to Brent crude, the benchmark for almost all oil produced in Europe and West Africa.



Bye Bye---General Lee
 
From the article (analysis) Red,



There are no pipelines to carry the crude directly.






Bye Bye---General Lee

Good info General. Proves my point. They are going to over the road and barge it down the river for a proposed 20 dollar savings. Moving that much crude by truck/train etc. is going to be a killer. Wrong refinery in the wrong place. Just saw Boone Pickens laughing about this in an interview. I'd say he knows a little about crude. Good luck. Your 'hopefull' pay increases might be getting ready to go up one of the refineries gas flares.
 
Good info General. Proves my point. They are going to over the road and barge it down the river for a proposed 20 dollar savings. Moving that much crude by truck/train etc. is going to be a killer. Wrong refinery in the wrong place. Just saw Boone Pickens laughing about this in an interview. I'd say he knows a little about crude. Good luck. Your 'hopefull' pay increases might be getting ready to go up one of the refineries gas flares.

Red,

First of all, something has changed in the partner side of this. It was supposed to be JP Morgan, but I guess it is now BP Oil. They will supply the oil, and now DL will refine it. But, DL will only keep the Jet A, and the rest will be given to BP, and there are other swaps around the NE that will do the same. Delta just wants the Jet A, and CNBC said this will cover 80% of the domestic needs, mostly in the NE. So, that is why there is no need for a pipeline. Delta will probably refine the fuel there, and TRADE with other oil companies around the NE for their Jet A, in exchange for other oil products (oil, heating oil, diesel, etc) that is refined at the Delta refinery. Get it? They trade oil products in their refinery for Jet A in OTHER places. CNBC said they have swap contracts all over the NE. That is GREAT.

As far as T Boone Pickens goes, how's his wind energy thing going? It never did catch on. I think he was nervously laughing, primarily because he was probably used to screwing over the airlines, and now one has figured out how to get rid of the middleman. All Delta wants to do is buy Jet A cheaper, and Delta spends $12 billion a year on fuel, which is second in the World behind our Department of Defense. If that was your number one cost, I would think you would want to figure out how to bring it down. They estimate they will save around $300 million per year. I think that is great. The oil and fuel will be stored in the NYC area I believe, and maybe BP will make some big bucks in that market selling gasoline? I know the prices are pretty high up there.....



Bye Bye---General Lee
 
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