Magellan said the acquisition leverages its expertise in transporting and storing petroleum products by expanding its crude logistics infrastructure and its energy footprint in Cushing, Okla.
They stand to benefit from an expanding world economy even if crude prices stay flat, as producers revitalize existing energy fields and explore for new ones.
But as the world's stocks of accessible, lighter crude dwindle, the oil industry is expanding development of this bottom-of-the-barrel material -- a process that poses its own health concerns.
Now, with oil prices slumping, Ecuador faces even more pressure to expand the Amazonian oil frontier because Quito owes crude to China.
Syria expressed its support today for a Saudi peace effort for the Middle East, while a bomb planted in an Arab schoolyard and crude rockets fired at an Israeli town fed the rapidly expanding blood feud between Israelis and Palestinians.
If the distillation capacity of a plant increases holding all other process capacities and complexity factors fixed, for example, refinery complexity will decrease since the individual weight factors will decline, while if one or more units are added or expanded for a given crude capacity, refinery complexity will increase.
EBA process design was performed with the goal of finding operating conditions which, on one hand, allow efficient adsorption of the target protein and which, on the other hand, support the formation of a perfectly classified fluidised bed (expanded bed) in the crude feed solution.
It would also feed a hungry and expanding fleet of refiners on the Gulf Coast whose facilities are designed to handle the heavy sort of crude that would flow from Canada's tar sands.
The high price of crude also drives up the cost of drilling for and transporting oil as service providers demand a bigger slice of an expanding pie.
The company is also investing in units that will expand its production of heavy crude oil into diesel, and is pouring $8.6 billion into reducing sulfur at its 11 refineries.
