(Bloomberg) — Leaving behind the waters of the Caribbean Sea, the 1,100-feet long oil tanker Maran Apollo is emblematic of the wider petroleum market.
Steaming at 11.5 knots, she’s heading toward China, where oil demand is fast recovering, hauling a cargo of two million barrels of U.S. crude. But her voyage didn’t start a few days ago. She loaded in early May, and with no buyers during the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the supertanker stood floating in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico for almost two months, waiting for better times.
Only a few days ago, she weighed anchor and left for the Chinese port of Rizhao — a sign that refiners are starting to pull in crude that went unwanted for months.
It’s not any kind oil on board, though. Refiners are competing for barrels in one corner of the market known as medium-heavy sour crude — barrels with a higher content in sulfur and relatively dense. It’s the kind of oil that Saudi Arabia and its allies pump. And also the type of crude that’s pumped offshore in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico — and that’s what’s in the Maran Apollo’s tanks.
Like the wine industry, the oil market has its own vintages: global refiners seek their barrels much like connoisseurs covet bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Urals of Russia and Arab Light from Saudi Arabia are normally two of the most widely consumed — think Cabernet Sauvignon, maybe a Merlot. But in today’s oil market, such crude is in increasingly short supply due to record output cuts by the two nations and their allies.
“Deep OPEC+ cuts and demand recovery have tightened balances and this has been reflected in improvements in physical differentials,” said Bassam Fattouh, director of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “But the recovery has not been even, with medium-sour crudes faring better than light-sweet crudes.”
In normal times, medium-sour crude is usually cheaper than other streams, particularly those known as light sweet crude that have a lower sulfur content and are less dense.
But OPEC, which pumps mostly medium-sour crude, has cut output to the lowest since 1991, and Russia has also implemented brutal reductions. On top of that, medium and heavy sour crude accounts for the bulk of the supplies from Iran and Venezuela, where production has collapsed under the weight of U.S. sanctions and lack of investment.
The market is reflecting the under supply. The price of Urals, Russia’s flagship grade, has surged to a record premium to the Brent crude benchmark. Last week, it briefly changed hands at $2.40 a barrel above Dated Brent, a regional benchmark, compared with a discount of more than $4.50 a barrel in April, according to traders. S&P Global Platts, a price-reporting agency, assessed the grade at a premium of $1.90 for delivery to Rotterdam on June 29, matching a prior record high.
The surge means that Urals is selling in Rotterdam, the main oil refinery hub in northwest Europe, at roughly $45 a barrel, compared with a low point of about $15 a barrel in early April.
The price pattern is similar for other sour crude streams,…
Read More: In the Physical Oil Market, Sour Barrels Trade at Sweet Prices
