John Lipinski
Analyst · Simmons
Well, one of the reasons we acquired the Wynnewood facility was its proximity to Coffeyville. But also, it was a way to parlay our logistic assets in Cushing to improve the operation, not only the operation but the economics of Wynnewood. Refineries are just basically a mechanism to turn the lowest price crude oil into finished product that you can sell. With our pipeline space coming down from Canada, the logistics assets we have, the gathering and everything else, we're making serious inroads into the cost of crude, delivered crude for Wynnewood. Historically, that plant delivered crude somewhere between $0.30 and $0.50, a barrel above WTI. They would buy WTI. They buy some WTS, but after delivery costs, they would deliver in above that. We are already below WTI on that and expect to see significant improvements, particularly with our ability to access midland WTI, Bakken and just a list of other crudes plus our own gathered crudes. Again, gathering in the areas is going to very, very significant. So the very first thing is we would expect a significant -- over time significant drop in the acquisition cost in crude which dollar per dollar goes to our EBITDA. On the operations side, the Gary-Williams Energy company was not as technically focused. The company was a private company, not as technically focused as we are at CVR Energy. Today, we took a cat cracker down. We did some improvements, actually did a fair bit of work that would have otherwise be executed in the fall turnaround and came back and just increased unit capacity by 3% or 4% and increase liquid yield. By just adjusting the way we operate certain units, we significantly improved our jet fuel yield. Basically, we're making about 1,000 barrels a day more jet fuel than the plant did before and that's at the expense of gasoline, so you're taking one of the highest value products, making our highest value product from one of our lower value product. So we're pretty excited about what we see. Ultimately, the synergies at Coffeyville and Wynnewood will become apparent. There are cycles. Our Coker is large enough at Coffeyville. So that if the asphalt market were to get really soft, we could take those barrels and coke them at Coffeyville. And you remember, we make somewhere like 8% or 9% asphalt out of -- at Wynnewood. We've been able to increase crude rates. Again, I've mentioned this before, we're running at 70,000 barrels a day. It's our goal to take the same team of technical people and operators and use the same work ethics, the same intelligence, the same engineering principles that we took Coffeyville which was actually a bankrupt company back in 2004 and turned it into one of the premiere refineries in the Mid-continent. We're going to do the same thing with Wynnewood.