Capacity for ship-to-ship transfers of crude oil off the coast of Oman has reached its limits after Saudi Arabia diverted its flows from the port of Yanbu amid Houthi attacks, Reuters has reported, citing unnamed trading sources and analysts.
The report said Saudi Arabia has sold some 60 million barrels of crude, to be shipped from the Gulf of Oman after being transferred from smaller carriers to supertankers, for delivery this month and in October. This has tightened an already tight very large crude carrier market and led to a further increase in oil shipping costs.
The ship-to-ship transfer route involves loading crude at a Persian Gulf coast, shipping it across the Strait of Hormuz and transferring the cargo to a larger tanker in the safer Gulf of Oman. The daily rate so far in September has been averaging 3.6 million barrels, according to Kpler. This is up from just 900,000 barrels daily in August, before the Yemeni Houthis attacked the East-West pipeline.
This amount of crude needs between 36 and 40 additional very large crude carriers, Kpler analyst Panagiotis Krontiras told the publication. “That 2 million bpd uplift in Saudi flows will generate additional demand for 15 VLCCs for shuttle runs alone,” Oil Brokerage’s head of global shipping research, Anoop Singh, said in a note quoted by Reuters. The analyst explained that exporting the same amount of oil that in August required 24 VLCCs, in September requires 40 very large crude carriers because of the ship-to-ship transfers.
To make the tanker availability situation worse, there are 20 tankers sitting in the Red Sea waiting for the port of Yanbu to resume operations. Because of the tanker supply tightness, daily freight rates for VLCCs have jumped to an all-time high of $1.27 million as of this Monday, per LSEG data cited by Reuters.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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