Cushing Refinery hub part of ABC oil special

Yes, we know gasoline comes from a pump at a station or convenience store. Some of us know that gasoline comes from a refinery hub but may not know that there is one less than 50 miles from Tulsa. Still fewer are aware that Canada is the largest supplier of U.S. oil, that oil from Saudi Arabia is the cheapest, and oil from the Gulf of Mexico is the most expensive to extract.

ABC News’ anchor Charles Gibson plans to get viewers up to speed with the whole story from gas pump to oil well in the special “Over a Barrel: The Truth About Oil,” airing Wednesday.

“The real purpose is, if you drive a car or happen to be alive and live in America today, your life is deeply affected by our addiction to oil,” said executive producer Tom Yellin, who is president and executive producer of the Documentary Group, and spent most of most of his childhood summers in Okmulgee and “at least 15 Thanksgivings in Tulsa.”

(Yellin, whose mother graduated from Tulsa’s Central High School and whose grandfather was mayor of Okmulgee, is descended from Dixie Gilmer, an Oklahoma state representative who served as Tulsa County attorney and stood unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the office of Oklahoma governor.)

“Not just gasoline but oil is so ubiquitous,” said Yellin in a recent phone interview from his New York office. “The thing that got us interested was noting that supply was up and the demand was down slightly. But it wasn’t reflected in the price.

“We decided to start at the gas tank and work backward
to try and understand how gasoline is created and that is what brought us to Cushing where we discovered all kinds of things. One of them is that the national price of a barrel of oil is set in Cushing.”

Tulsa World