More foreign oil flows into Washington state's refineries.

By Brandon Sprague, The Seattle Times Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Aug. 1--BLAINE, Wash. -- To help meet Washington's soaring demand for gasoline this summer, a tanker nearly three football fields long arrives at the BP Cherry Point refinery roughly every three days and offloads hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil -- usually enough to make more than 10 million gallons of gasoline.

On most days, the massive ships carry oil from Alaska's Prudhoe Bay.

But on a day earlier this month the ship was the British Osprey, arriving after several weeks at sea with a mix of crudes from Indonesia and Kuwait. The previous day, the British Laurel had docked with oil all the way from Iraq.

Washington once may have enjoyed an economic advantage as home to the U.S. refineries closest to Alaska, but in today's global energy market, that edge has all but disappeared.

The state's refineries are fed a growing amount of imported crude, while other countries also bid for Alaska's output. For instance, the Cherry Point refinery in Ferndale produces one-fifth of the state's gasoline supply, and imports 30 percent of its crude from foreign sources, executives said.

That puts Washington squarely into the ebb and flow of international oil markets.