12 March 2018, Climate News Network, Alberta’s oil exports face ocean of trouble. Alberta’s oil exports are at serious risk. Last month the first supertanker capable of holding two million barrels of oil sailed for the first time from America’s newly upgraded – and only – terminal able to handle crude-carrying giants of this size: the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP). She was bound for China, and her maiden voyage signals a major shift in global oil shipping patterns, economics, and the highly competitive oil refinery business. The LOOP terminal is deep in the Mississippi Delta. A 29-kilometre pipeline stretches across the shallow Gulf of Mexico coastal shelf to a point deep enough to allow similar Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) to unload their vast tonnages. Nearby a complex of salt caverns and surface tanks stores both oil imports headed for US refineries and fast-increasing volumes of oil bound for export. The LOOP terminal is a speculator’s venture on steroids. Built with private capital, it is North America’s first oil port dedicated to the planet’s largest crude tankers, handling two-way oil flows. It’s designed to thrive on fierce global fights over not just oil supply and demand, but the multi-billion dollar bets corporate oil traders and hedge funds place, hoping to buy low and sell high – now or years hence. Two cargoes at once. Any VLCC from any country can now unload or load oil at the LOOP. They can carry it – two million barrels at a time – to ports across the globe, at a price lower than smaller tankers. That will probably prove fatal to the plans of the Canadian province of Alberta to expand unrefined bitumen exports by either the proposed Trans-Mountain pipeline to the British Columbia coast or the planned Keystone XL pipeline to Texas. Bitumen, or asphalt, is the feedstock which tar sands and oil sands producers remove from the ground, thick enough to require mining, not pumping. It then has to be diluted with light crude oil or other chemicals before it can go through a pipeline (hence the term diluted bitumen). Read More here