The Brent oil price was smashed again last night to $43.78 as I write. There was little news. It’s just that there’s still too much oil and we’re running out of places to put it, from Citi:
Oil in “quasi-storage”, which is oil on the water that is yet to be delivered but has not been earmarked for floating storage, is on the rise at ~100-m bbls of combined crude and oil products.
Up-to-date observed stock data and capacities have always been hard to come by, but our best estimations put available crude storage in Europe, Japan, South Korea, China and Saldanha Bay at 46-m bbls. Table 2 shows the availability and current levels of crude in-tank by region. Europe, Japan and South Korea are benchmarked vs. previous maximums, which given refinery closures may even estimate on the high-side.
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
