Tom Nimbley
Analyst · Scotia Howard. Please go ahead.
Okay, I'm going to try and if I don't get them all in sequence come back at me. First of all, there is a difference, it's not huge. There is the slight advantage that is available if you run the coker feeds or the fuel oil and in particular directly to a fluid coker. And without getting too technical, basically we have the capability and our fluid coker in Delaware to split that heavy fuel oil half -- a portion of it will go directly into the reactor that chews up hydraulic capacity, which is also most of the time the limiting agent for how hard you can run your coker. But in a fluid coker, you can also put some of that material into another processing unit as part of the coker called the scrubber, and that allows you to flash off the lighter products, the cutters that are in heavy fuel oil. So effectively, you get that out and you don't have to put it in a reactor. So you don't take as much of a capacity debt. On a delayed coker, you're pretty much putting the stuff into the coker directly, but you're going to have back out crude, or resid from crude if the coker is already full. Now a second piece of your question, and I think this really all gets related is, is there a back out? Well, yes. There can be depending upon the type of fuel oil you're running and most importantly, the type of crude oil that you're running, i. e., if you are running -- if we're running a bunch of Maya, very heavy crude, and we decided we want to run high-sulfur fuel into say the crude unit at Chalmette, the back out ratio would not be very significant, because Maya is such a heavy crude. If on the other hand, you were backing out maybe in our medium or MAR certainly, then you would have and your coker was full and your crude unit was full, there would be a bigger back out ratio. Finally, if I'm getting there, Paul, but basically, the way you would have to look at it is, what is the gravity of the crude oil that you're running versus the gravity and the quality of the fuel oil you are buying to put into the crude unit, and there will be a back out ratio depending upon what crudes are in there. And that's just an economic analysis of the way you want to do.