Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound as simplistic as $.75/bbl. That's the price of Bakken delivered to the Clearbrook terminal compared to WTI. Nigerian crude carries a slight premium on Brent ... call it $1/bbl for simplicity's sake. The spread (price difference) between Brent and WTI has increased significantly over the last five years - it's currently around $21/bbl price differential (up from near parity). The Nigerian price doesn't include shipping costs to the US so the savings of using Bakken over Nigerian are probably closer to $5/bbl. Also keep in mind that there are more than 150 different varieties of crude oil, but Brent and WTI are the widely used benchmarks.
The spread between WTI and Brent is mainly due to increased oil production in north America. There is so much oil coming out of Canada and the US - with most pipelines leading to Cushing, OK - that the price of the WTI benchmark has fallen. And the WTI quote you see on CNBC is based on taking delivery in Cushing, OK.
A problem that we have is that our oil industry is still set up for importing much more oil from overseas than we produce. That started to change with increased Canadian production and now several US fields are producing a lot of oil - the most noted is Bakken. What this country needs is new pipelines pushing these new sources of oil to current refineries or building new refineries near the sources of oil.
As far as oil refining on the east coast, the northeastern US refineries are targeted for shutdown due to a number of factors, one of which is that European refineries are producing more auto gasoline than needed due to a shift toward diesel vehicles in Europe. As a result, surplus refined gasoline is being exported from Europe (Rotterdam and the UK) to the northeast US. During summer 2012, I think that there was approximately 1 million barrels of refined gasoline per day being imported to the east coast from Rotterdam.
There are also extensive pipelines that carry refined products from the Gulf of Mexico refineries to the east coast. Those refineries have been increasing refining capacity so they've been able to supply more refined products throughout the US. Here in Tucson, our gasoline comes from Gulf coast refineries via the Longhorn Pipeline (Houston to El Paso) and then the Kinder Morgan East Pipeline (El Paso to Phoenix with a terminal just outside of Tucson). There are similar pipelines carrying refined products to the east coast.
As far as the future of Bakken oil, I think that the most efficient use of the oil is to refine it onsite because there is so much excess natural gas being flared (burned) at the wellhead - somewhere around 1/3 of the natural gas is being flared. This is due to there not being enough capacity to move the natural gas from the oil fields to end consumers. Instead of burning off the excess, that natural gas could be used as fuel to refine the crude if refineries were built in close proximity of the oil fields.
At this time, there are at least three new refineries under proposal/construction in North Dakota. http://oilpatchdispatch.areavoices.com/2013/02/07/north-dakota-refinery-announcement-expected-today/
What Delta appears to be attempting to do with their Trainer refinery is reduce the jet fuel crack spread. A typical barrel of oil yields ~14% jet fuel. Delta is optimizing Trainer to produce a higher percentage of jet fuel; somewhere on the order of 32%. By increasing the percentage of jet fuel vs other refined products, Delta will likely reduce the jet fuel crack spread industrywide.
