Analysis – Alaska Crude Likely First to Flow Around U.S. Export Ban

Photo Credit: APOil traders looking for cracks in a contentious decades-old U.S. ban on crude exports should be looking west, not east.

The first big cargoes to be shipped far overseas are likely to come from one of the country’s oldest oil patches, Alaska, rather than booming new shale fields like the Eagle Ford of Texas, or North Dakota’s Bakken.

Oil companies and analysts are already examining the widening arbitrage window for selling Alaska’s North Slope (ANS) crude to Asia, looking to resume shipments that halted a decade ago as rising domestic output of light, sweet crude threatens to crowd long-time baseload ANS out of West Coast refineries.

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