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Chinese Oil: Google Images Show Growing Crude Storage in China
Spencer Swartz, Wall Street Journal
The economic recovery may yet tarry, and oil demand is still anemic, but there might be a solid reason crude oil has perched above $60 a barrel. Energy analysts at Sanford Bernstein say eye-in-the-sky satellite images from Google show the Chinese are packing away a rising amount of crude in storage tanks.

“Our analysis confirms that tanker capacity arrivals into China have spiked up in recent months, in line with imports, but more importantly, tanker arrivals into Strategic Petroleum Reserve ports have increased materially,” Bernstein says Friday in a research report.

Just as satellite imaging has helped fuel debate over the true state of oil supplies—especially in Saudi Arabia—the new technology promises to give oil-market watchers a chance to crack the demand side of the puzzle too.

Bernstein estimates that the amount of crude entering the SPR ports in China—the world’s second biggest oil consumer after the U.S.–has increased by around 400,000 barrels a day since November, based on its assessment using the satellite imaging services of Google, the search engine company.

Those barrels are tiny in the overall scheme of the global oil market, but when crude consumption has gone negative in the U.S. and elsewhere, those added barrels do matter.
(22 May 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav. -BA

Are we moving towards a new oil crisis?
Andris Piebalgs, blog
One of the few good pieces of news in the current economic crisis (maybe the only one) is that oil prices have gone from the 147$ a barrel of July 2008 more than 100$ down to less than $50 a barrel on the international markets. However, in the last days we have seen oil prises rising and reaching the price of $58 a barrel for the first time in nearly six months. Nevertheless low oil prices are also good news for gas, since gas prices are normally linked to those of oil. If we remember the difficulties that European fishermen and truck drivers had last year we can imagine what their problems with be if in the middle of an economic crisis they had to deal as well with prices over 100% a barrel.

However, we should not be under any illusion. The current fall of oil prizes is just the consequence of an even more dramatic fall in demand due to economic crisis. I add to that the fears in the financial markets you will understand why investments in futures of any commodity except the safest ones (gold, for instance) are so rare. But the fundamentals that drive the energy markets have not changed. Once the economic crisis is over demand for hydrocarbons will soar again, particularly in the developing world. And some countries are preparing for that. For example the Chinese government has granted a credit to Russian State owned oil companies Rosneft and Transneft $25 bn. against daily supplies of 48,000 tonnes of oil for the next 20 years.

The world is aware that the production of the existing oil wells is decaying and that new discoveries are more scarce and more expensive. Some experts consider that global oil production may have peaked at 94 million barrels a day. The current economic crisis can make the situation worse. The lower prices that we are enjoying now can be in fact bad news. At this price oil producers have been forced to postpone many necessary investments in new production capacity. These investments take decades to be accomplished. In consequence, if the current economic crisis finished and demand recovers we could be facing huge shortage of supplies that can lead to extremely high prices.
(8 May 2009)

Bust and boom
Briefing, The Economist
RISING oil prices, believes Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, may soon “take the wheels off an already derailed world economy”. His Iranian counterpart agrees: “When the global economic crisis comes to an end, and the demand for oil picks up, the oil market could experience another price shock,” he says. The boss of Chevron, America’s second-biggest oil firm, also worries that “another period of tight supply” is at hand. Britain’s energy minister is fearful too. Indeed, at a recent summit of oil grandees convened by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) it was hard to find anyone who did not expect a price rise to rival the giddy leap to $147 a barrel last year.

On the face of things, this concern is absurd. The plunge of $115 in the price of oil from its peak last July to its nadir in December was the most precipitous the world has ever seen. Demand for oil is still falling, as the world economy atrophies. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental body which advises rich countries, thinks that global oil consumption will fall by 2.6m barrels a day (b/d) this year, or about 3%. That follows a fall of 200,000 b/d last year. World demand has not shrunk for two years running since the early 1980s.

In recent weeks America’s oil inventories have been higher than ever at this time of year, and higher than at any point save September 1990, in the run-up to the first Gulf war. There is little room left to store any more crude, says Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs. Rumours abound of traders hiring tankers to store their excess oil. Rich countries’ stocks cover 62 days’ consumption, the most since 1993 (see chart 1). The average over the past five years has been 52 days’ worth.