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Virtue Sanctioning of oil doesn't work (just like Socialism doesn't work).
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https://irinaslav.substack.com/p/its-embargo-time
"It's embargo time
As of Monday, May 30th, Urals was trading at a $35 discount to Brent crude per barrel. Saudi Arabia’s flagship Arab Light, categorised by S&P Global as medium sour as well, was trading at $116.31 per barrel as of Monday.
The UAE’s Upper Zakum, which has comparable medium sour chracteristics to Urals, was trading at $113.87 per barrel Monday.
Iraq’s Basrah Light is also relatively close to Urals in terms of API gravity and sulfur content to Urals but Iraq has excluded that grade from 2022 allocation options.
To cut a long and tedious story short, the OPEC basket was trading at close to $119 per barrel Monday before the EU embargo agreement was announced. After the announcement, it rose to $120.
I don’t think we need to guess where OPEC oil prices are headed for the rest of the week or the next few months, really. In other words, proud and moral EU will be paying a lot more for the oil that, disgusting as it may be, it still needs.
But it’s not just refinery configurations that will limit the choice of EU buyers in crude grades. Availability will play a significant role as well and availability is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite tight.
In April, OPEC produced a quite impressive 2.7 million bpd of crude less than it was supposed to under its own output recovery quotas. In the current price environment this could, and does, mean two things: first, some members cannot produce more than they are already producing and second, other members have done what they could for oil prices and couldn’t do any more.
What’s left? U.S. oil, of course. The United States exported 4.341 million barrels of crude daily in the week to May 20, the latest week there’s detailed data for. This compared with 3.52 million bpd a week earlier, so there’s a solid increase.
The U.S. exported even more refined products, at 6.235 million bpd during that most recent week with detailed data. A lot of that, though not all, went to Europe. And a lot of it will probably continue to go to Europe. If refiners can cope, that is.
Reuters earlier this week published a report that should cause concern, and a lot of it. The report suggests that global refining capacity is lower than it needs to be in order to satisfy demand for oil products. And the U.S., specifically, has slipped into something fascinatingly called a structural deficit of refining capacity, for the first time in decades. That capacity is down by 1 million bpd since 2019, according to official data cited in the report.
As a result, of course, the operating refineries have had to increase their utilisation rates, especially with exports booming, with rates reaching over 92%. The fun part is that "We've been at this 93% utilization; generally, you can't sustain it for long periods of time," according to Valero Energy’s chief commercial officer Gary Simmons.