Oil Drillers Resort to Trucks as Key California Pipe Idled (1)

Oil drillers in central California have resorted to the costly and cumbersome alternative of trucking crude barrels 50 miles after the shut down of a refinery and idling of a key pipeline cut off outlets for their products.

Up to 35,000 barrels a day of oil used to flow north from California’s once-prolific Kern oil field to refineries in the San Francisco Bay area on a pipeline operated by Crimson Midstream LLC. The San Pablo Bay Pipeline has been empty since December, however, after one of the key buyers — Valero Energy Corp’s Benicia refinery — prepared to ...