Officials Celebrate Opening of Fuel Transport Facility in Southwest Philly
By Paul Kurtz
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Governor Tom Corbett and Mayor Michael Nutter traveled to the Greys Ferry neighborhood of Southwest Philadelphia today to help celebrate the opening of a high-speed railway unloading facility at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery complex.
The first trainload of crude oil arrived today from North Dakota's Bakken shale region, only about a year after PES and the Carlyle Group took over the operation of the refinery complex from Sunoco.
PES chief executive Phil Rinaldi (center of photo) says in those whirlwind 12 months they have created the largest such complex on the east coast.
"This facility has the capability to unload two unit trains every 24 hours," he said, "each unit train being approximatlely a mile and a half in length, 120 cars each, holding 80,000 barrels. That's 160,000 barrels a day of crude oil coming into this rail facility."
And Governor Corbett (fourth from left, in white shirt) says there's more to come -- from Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale field.
"There's a pipeline coming over here soon that's going to be bringing natural gas over. You're using natural gas now to fuel some of your efforts here but also to create a propane and ethane facility here," the governor said, although that pipeline project is in the very early stages.
