Come By Chance refinery opens door

• Newfoundland’s Come By Chance refinery is for the first time buying domestic crude pumped from fields only a few hundred miles offshore, marking the latest addition to its increasingly versatile slate.

The 115,000 barrel-per-day refinery recently began taking deliveries of White Rose crude, a refinery spokeswoman confirmed. Until now, the relatively medium-sweet variety has been a stranger to the refinery, despite its close proximity in the northern Atlantic Ocean.

The first cargo was shipped in December, according to Husky Energy Inc., which operates the fields that make up the roughly 45,000-bpd White Rose stream. At least four other vessels followed in April and May, passing briefly through the Whiffen Head terminal to a refinery dock about a mile away, according to vessel tracking data available on Thomson-Reuters’ Eikon.

Although the field has been pumping oil for a decade, most of the crude has been shipped to refiners on the U.S. East coast eager for nearby medium-sweet oil.

Come By Chance had shunned White Rose in favour of longer-distance grades closer to the sour varieties it was mainly built to consume.

The deliveries are the latest sign of a new approach to crude supply by the new owners. It is also part of a flux in global crude supply routes, which have been tangled by the growth of production from U.S. shale fields.

“They have become a merchant refinery,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, referring to a type of freewheeling refinery that has no fixed supply or market.

The refinery was purchased in November by New York-based SilverRange, run by Neal Shear, a former top commodities banker at Morgan Stanley, and ex-Lehman Brothers executive Kaushik Amin. The team negotiated a new supply and offtake agreement with BP PLC and overhauled operational management at the site.

Colleen McConnell, the Husky spokeswoman, said the firm has sold more cargoes this year, but declined to say how many.

Gloria Warren-Slade, a refinery spokeswoman, said, “the refinery runs different crudes from time to time, and White Rose happens to be one of them this time.”