Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) And our first question today is from Mark Flannery with Credit Suisse.
Mike Jennings
Good morning, Mark.
Operator
And you might check your mute button.
Mike Jennings
Maybe we will try somebody else and come back to Mark.
Operator
We will go to Erik Mielke with Merrill Lynch.
Erik Mielke - Merrill Lynch
Hey, good morning. Can you hear me?
Mike Jennings
Sure can.
Erik Mielke - Merrill Lynch
Very good. I would like to just try to take dig into a little bit more of what you are talking about crude pricing and how it's affecting your operations and the opportunities that you have. Can you comment a little bit on how much flexibility you have at El Dorado? And also how it affects the product yield given the change that we have seen between the distillate and gasoline, as you just outlined yourselves that diesel margins have been not as good in February as they were in January, and generally speaking, gasoline margins have been better in February than in January?
Mike Jennings
Paul, would you take him through that, please?
Paul Eisman
You bet. First of all, I’ll point out that the El Dorado Refinery has tremendous flexibility to run crudes from any number of areas. We have access to a good amount of Canadian crude and so we can run the heavies out Canadian, but we can also run the light sour crude oils out of Canada. We have access to WTI/WTS and any domestic crude and then also through pipelines coming up to Cushing we can run crudes coming from the Gulf Coast.
What we have seen recently is Cushing being very full of crude. I mean in fact, Cushing is at its operable limit. And the fact that crude continues to go to Cushing while it's full has driven this contango market and has really provided the opportunity that we have seen in El Dorado.
Now in terms of how that impacts us, what we have seen is, we have seen this narrowing of the light/heavy differential and that’s versus the TI barrel. But as I mentioned in my comments, if you are a Chicago or an Ontario refiner and your alternative is not a Cushing barrel, but a barrel either from the East Coast or a barrel from the Gulf Coast, an LOS as an example. There is about a $4 additional differential that’s added into that. So, while we may have a $7 differential today, light/heavy, they will experience about $11 differential versus their alternative crudes.
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