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BUSINESS

Mondiale olie-opslagcrisis

By Duncan Mil

April 22, 2020 - De prijs van Amerikaanse ruwe olie voor levering in Juni is hersteld tot net boven $11 per vat, terwijl de Brent – de internationale benchmark – voor het eerst sinds 1999 tot onder $20 per vat zakte.

Coronavirus has sent the oil sector into a state of crisis, with lockdowns and travel bans slashing global demand for crude by as much as 30 per cent from pre-crisis levels.

The collapse of West Texas Intermediate on Monday into negative territory has caused embarrassment for U.S. President Donald Trump, who had touted his recent brokering of an Opec+ deal to cut oil supply.

Saudi Arabia, Russia and other producers reached agreement on April 12 to cut 9.7 million barrels of daily oil output. But the cuts won’t go into effect until May 1. The global oil industry is producing about 30 million barrels a day more oil than the world needs.

On Monday, Trump said that he was looking at storing as much as 75 million barrels of U.S. oil in the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), filling the emergency stockpile to the brim, but he must first win funding from the U.S. Congress.

America’s SPR is the most massive emergency oil supply in the world, capable of storing some 800 million barrels. The SPR could hold five weeks of U.S. overproduction (75 million barrels).

As inland storage facilities fill up, oil traders are scrambling to book supertankers for storage. Traders have booked 100 of the world’s 815 VLCCs -- Very Large Crude Carriers -- each of which can hold around two million barrels of oil. According to Norway-based Frontline Management AS, one of the world’s biggest tanker owners, VLCC-rates have now hit $150,000 a day, up from $10,000 a day in April 2019.

Sources
PUBLISHED: 22/04/2020; STORY: Graphic News; PICTURES: Getty Images
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