Originally Posted by Danno
The really strange part is Canada is a net exporter of oil, but eastern Canada is still mostly supplied from Saudi Arabia.
We have pipelines in place that can supply across Canada.
All I can say is "follow the money".
This has to do with the refineries and which kind of oil is easiest (cheapest) for them to process. Those refineries are equipped to refine light, "sweet" crude, which the Middle East exports in large volumes. You typically don't see that type of crude coming from the Canada oil sands.
The inverse is true in portions of the US Gulf coast-- they import oil that is the heavier variety of crude because most of the refineries were built when heavy or "sour" crude was being imported from Venezuela in huge quantities. The oil from Venezuela is largely long gone, and now there's an overabundance of light crude, but it's more cost effective for those refineries to keep importing the sour crude from Canada and elsewhere.