Oil's crept up a bit lately, huh? Big deal. Remember last year when we thought $80 a barrel was cheap. That's right - don't forget it.
Anywho, I was taking a peek at things and you wouldn't know the ever-present glut has shrunk; in fact, it's grown. Here's a bit from Investor's Chronicle:
Rotterdam is Europe's largest port and refinery centre, with land-based storage for an estimated 75m barrels of oil. However, its tanks are believed to be nearing capacity, leaving inbound tankers with nowhere to discharge their stocks and effectively forced to serve as expensive floating storage vessels.
Many tankers have been forced to drop anchor outside the port (I saw lines of tankers moored off the Dutch coast during a recent flight to Amsterdam) with others lying idle off the coasts of Texas, Nigeria and southern England. Some 30 to 50 supertankers, each carrying around two million barrels of crude, are now believed to be serving as floating storage, together with a similar number of smaller vessels carrying refined products. That's around 100m barrels of oil, more than enough to satisfy one day's total global consumption.
So the "floating glut" has grown from 80m barrels to 100m barrels.
- Brewskie
The recent oil rally is interesting. US employment is still going down, not up. Total US refined products consumption down 8 percent from last year. There is an NG glut. Much higher mpg cars coming to market.
ReplyDeleteI contend that prices are manipulated on the NYMEX, costing the US economy untold hundreds of billions of dollars....sure, they can't keep it at $148 when there is a glut, but maybe they can hold $60...instead of the $10 it might fall to....
The armada of floating tankers may get worse, as demand is not going up, but there appears to be about 1 mbd excess supply. That's about 50 tanjkers a day. Of course, most of the excess supply is pouring into land tanks, but sooner or later....
My guess is that US demand for refined products will only go down fro decades.....