Alberta's shippers of diluted bitumen began 2013 in an unenviable position. They were only getting about S60 per barrel for their product, but natural gas condensate—which raw bitumen is blended with so it will flow through pipelines—roughly tracks the price of light crude, which was about $90 per barrel. So to ship their bitumen to market, producers had to buy a product costing roughly 50 per cent more. It takes roughly half of a barrel of condensate to pipeline a barrel of bitumen. (As a general rule of thumb, half a barrel of condensate is blended with one barrel of pure bitumen; hence, the condensate is roughly one-third of the diluted bitumen.) Given the often-wide gap between the price of what's being bought and what's being sold, this is hardly a desirable situation for the bitumen seller.
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