SYN, Premium Albian, and the other light barrels of the oil sands.
Field guide entry · written September 23, 2026.
Synthetic crude is bitumen that has been cracked and hydrogenated into a refinery-ready light oil. "Sweet" means low sulphur, generally under 0.2 percent. The light sweet synthetics run 30-plus API with high middle-distillate yield, which is why refiners pay up for them and why they trade at a premium to WTI when supply gets tight. In one August session with upgraders down for maintenance, light synthetic settled more than $14 a barrel over WTI.
SYN pools Suncor and Syncrude barrels. Premium Albian comes from the Scotford upgrader (CNRL 60 percent, Shell 20, Chevron 20; Shell operates). The CNRL light sweet blend comes from Horizon, which is 100 percent CNRL.
The light synthetics pool at Edmonton and Hardisty and move on the big export systems: the Enbridge Mainline to the US Midwest, Trans Mountain to Burnaby and the West Coast, and some into local refineries. A large share of the AOSP barrels never leaves the Edmonton area: it feeds the Shell Scotford refinery next door to the upgrader.
SCO is the light barrel in a heavy basin. Upgrader outages do two things at once: they remove premium-priced light supply, and the redirect-and-tilt response adds heavy dilbit supply. That is the synthetic premium widening while the heavy differential softens, in one event.
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