BP completes sale of huge Calif. refinery

BP has wrapped up the sale of its Carson, Calif., refinery, a major destination for North Slope crude oil.

Tesoro acquired the refinery, oil inventory and related logistics and marketing assets in a $2.4 billion transaction.

“With the completion of this divestment the strategic refocusing of our U.S. fuels portfolio is essentially complete,” said Iain Conn, chief executive of BP’s global refining and marketing business.

The Carson sale leaves BP with three northern U.S. refineries, including the Cherry Point refinery in Washington state, another major destination for Alaska crude. The other plants are in Indiana and Ohio.

BP is making major investments at all three refineries.

Cherry Point recently was upgraded to produce cleaner-burning diesel, and BP is building a new rail terminal at the plant to “take advantage of growing supplies of domestically produced crude oil,” the company said.

The Carson sale closed on June 1, with Tesoro taking ownership of the refinery near Los Angeles, plus an associated logistics network of pipelines and storage terminals and the ARCO-branded retail marketing network in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada.

“While the sale included BP’s ARCO retail brand rights, BP has exclusively licensed those rights from Tesoro for Northern California, Oregon and Washington,” BP said in a June 3 press release.

Carson is one of the largest refineries on the West Coast, with a crude distillation capacity of 266,000 barrels per day. The refinery began operations in 1938 and processes crude from Alaska, the Middle East and West Africa.

—Wesley Loy