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When Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek asked the oil industry if he could track crude flows from across the globe to a single gas station, the answer was unequivocal: It simply can't be done.

 

An industry spokeswoman reinforced that notion and even referred Salopek to a Web site debunking popular legends. Snopes.com declared: "[B]y the time crude oil gets from the ground into our gasoline tanks, there's no telling exactly where it came from."

 

As it turns out, that's not always true.

 

While gasoline is certainly a fungible commodity, the key to unlocking its far-flung sources lies hidden in an obscure industry document called a "crude slate." Every refinery in America keeps a slate, or list, of the types of oil it processes. Because the names of individual crudes on such lists often can be linked to precise oil reservoirs, they offer a remarkably accurate map of the global oil supplies pouring into the Midwest.

 

The hitch: Such data are among the tightest-held secrets of a secretive industry. Companies compete for oil supplies that can vary in price by a penny a barrel--a margin that at high volume can spell the difference between profit and loss.

 

Salopek approached the five oil companies with refineries in the Chicago market--Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP PLC, PDV-Midwest and Marathon Petroleum Co. Three declined to share their data. One didn't answer his calls.

 

Only Marathon agreed. Explaining why, Angelia Graves, a Marathon spokeswoman, said, "So much of what the industry does is a mystery to people."

 

Houston-based Marathon offered the information with one caveat: For competitive reasons, the exact dates of shipments to its Robinson refinery in Downstate Illinois can't be revealed. The Tribune asked that Marathon not alter its normal way of doing business during Salopek's project, and the company agreed.

 

The only exception was one Iraqi crude shipment originally bound for Chicago. It was diverted at the last moment to other Midwest refineries due to a sudden shift in demand for light crudes. Aware the Tribune was tracking the shipment, Marathon decided on its own to shunt a small portion back to Chicago.

 

The next challenge was finding a local gas station whose fuel supply was linked most clearly to Marathon's sprawling Robinson refinery. The best Chicago-area candidate turned out to be a new Marathon station in South Elgin. It is owned by a small fuel retailer, Prairie State Enterprises, and is restocked from the Mt. Prospect fuel terminal, a tank farm near O'Hare International Airport that is supplied directly by the Robinson refinery. By calculating fuel travel times inside miles of Illinois pipelines, the composition of the tank farm's gasoline was knowable on given days. The crude varieties in the mix were calculated by Marathon to a high degree of certainty, the company said; the proportions could vary from day to day.

 

Finally, between September and February, Salopek volunteered as a clerk at the South Elgin gas station. He did this on dozens of occasions; he wanted to capture the inner workings of a typical American service station and the lives of its regular customers. He was unpaid.

 

Salopek's co-workers were aware he was a Tribune reporter. And between staffing a cash register and mopping floors, he identified himself as a journalist to the people he interviewed.

 

After guidance from international energy analysts, oil tanker shipping firms, trucking companies and harbor masters on two continents--not to mention logistical help from African chieftains, Venezuelan dissidents and a British security company--Salopek and photographer Kuni Takahashi traveled to the distant sources of the South Elgin Marathon's gas.

 

In this way, they dispelled a well-guarded oil industry myth, and did what had never been done before.

 

- - - The journalists

 

Paul Salopek is a Tribune correspondent who has covered Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia and the Iraq war. His previous projects have included topics such as child marriage, fishing wars and international weapons trafficking. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for a story on the global human genome diversity project and the other for a variety of Africa coverage, including Congo's civil war. Staff photographer Kuni Takahashi joined the Chicago Tribune in 2004. Takahashi has covered the ongoing war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and other major domestic and international conflicts. His reportage on the child victims and former soldiers of Liberia resulted in the 2005 Tribune special report "Innocence Lost: The Children of Liberia's Civil War."

 

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