As the EU embargo on imports of Russian crude approaches on December 5th of this year, we wanted to revisit the topic. EU nations are mandated to stop buying waterborne Russian crude oil as of December 5th and refined oil products beginning February 5th of next year. Russia has historically exported approximately 4.5 – 5.0 million b/d of crude oil and about 3.0 million b/d of refined oil products, accounting for approximately 40% of their total export revenue.
As a result of the December 5th sanctions, we project a major contraction of VLCC cargoes ...
Tight Shipyard Capacity to Slow Delivery
Oct. 21, 2022
Compensated Gross Tonnage (CGT) is a measure established by OECD to compare the labor required to build a ship across different shipyards and countries. The latest available data confirms that 2022 has been a year of historically high capacity utilization, spread across almost all types of vessels, with 2023 following closely before we begin seeing a drop due to lack of complete future order data.
Chinese shipyards have the top CGT figure for 2022 with a little over 12 million CGT or about 41% of the total, followed closely by South Korea at 11.13 million CGT. According to a ...
The Impact of OPEC Cuts on Global Crude Balance
Oct. 14, 2022
OPEC+ decided at their October meeting in Vienna to reduce production by 2 million b/d beginning in November. The rationale given was to spur a recovery in crude prices despite calls from the US to pump additional supply to help ease pressure on the global economy. OPEC has stated that higher oil prices are necessary to kickstart fresh investments in oil production although other market participants like the IEA are skeptical, taking the position that constraints among oil producers meant additional supplies would be scant. The reality remains that OPEC’s own members are currently struggling with a lack ...
VLCC Fleet Development Updates
Oct. 7, 2022
The cumulative net fleet growth for the VLCC segment is expected to reach 48 tankers by the end of 2022 according to our latest analysis (Figure 1). The past month we saw an additional net 6 VLCCs returning from floating storage, in addition to the 6 captured fleet additions. For the balance of the year, we expect deliveries to continue at a good pace (about 10 new VLCCs in Q4), on top of a high number of ships returning from drydock (net 4) as well as at least 4 rejoining the DPP trading fleet after delivering CPP products on their ...
