The Oil Market’s Billion-Barrel Problem

How much runway does the world’s energy market still have? Our Head of Commodity Research Martijn Rats joins our Global Head of Fixed Income Research Andrew Sheets to explain what’s causing pressure beyond renewed tensions in the Middle East.

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----- Transcript -----

Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley.

Martijn Rats: And I'm Martijn Rats, Head of Commodity Research at Morgan Stanley.

Andrew Sheets: Today – talking about the recent volatility and the direction ahead for oil.

It's Wednesday, July 29th at 2pm in London.

Martijn, it's great to talk to you again. We haven't talked for a little while on this program. But oil is once again back in the headlines and it's moving around.

So maybe to just jump right into things, as you look at the lay of the land in global energy markets at the moment, what's been happening? What are you telling clients?

Martijn Rats: Okay. Well, we've had a large amount of volatility, over the last couple of weeks. If you roll the clock back, sort of, to the beginning of June. In the beginning of June, it started to become clear that already some more oil was leaking out of the Strait of Hormuz than perhaps, many of us anticipated at the time.

But that data has been confirmed since then. And then, of course, in the middle of June, we got the memorandum of understanding. And after that, roughly 100-150 million barrels a day or so that was behind the Strait of Hormuz got cleared. And that…

Andrew Sheets: These were tankers that were stuck there during the conflict, all came out.

Martijn Rats: Absolutely. Laden tankers that were there; had just basically turned into floating storage for a good couple of months. They all cleared out, and that actually created a bit of a glut, in the sense that all of a sudden, the refiners of this world had a lot of crude to absorb. And we saw many indications of physical looseness in the market, physical differentials, calendar spreads.

All sorts of indicators pointed that physically there was a lot of oil, temporarily to be absorbed. And the spot price of Brent fell to $70. And that looked to be the new direction of travel. In principle, the world is not short of oil if you take the geopolitics out of it.

So, for a while it, it looked bearish. But then a new set of disruptions came, and the military conflict restarted, and we've had 13 days of overnight bombing. And with that also the flow through the Strait of Hormuz diminished again. And we are back in the last, sort of, week, 10 days to very, very low levels. The same levels we had in March.

The flow through the strait is not exactly zero. But it's sort of 2-3 million barrels a day, sort of, down 80 percent to 90 percent of what it was before the conflict. And with that, prices have rallied. But on top of that, last week it looked like the military activity could really scale up. And for a couple of days, the markets priced that in.

But then we have other choke points to take into account now. Not only Hormuz, but the Bab el-Mandeb, the CPC terminal, the issues in global refining. Altogether, it's been a tremendously volatile period. So, we're on the whole leaning towards the constructive side because there are so many disruptions in the system. But it's a very hard one to call at the moment.

Andrew Sheets: So Martijn, let's talk about those other disruptions besides just the Strait of Hormuz. Because yeah, it's not just the Strait of Hormuz anymore. We have issues in the Red Sea. You have ongoing issues with Russian energy infrastructure that's being attacked by Ukraine. Just what are these other factors that are out there? And how much do they matter relative to, you know, how many ships are passing through the Strait of Hormuz?

Martijn Rats: Yeah. They matter a lot, and you can see that expressed in the price of refined product more than the price of crude. If you look at the main global benchmark for the price of diesel, which is arguably the ICE gas-oil contract, which are diesel barges delivered in Rotterdam or in the wider ARA area, it's trading at about $1,200 a ton, which is sort of $150-$160 per barrel.

That's where you see the tightness. And so out of the total end user price, the refiners are capturing more at the moment than the crude suppliers. But what end users pay is not $85 per barrel for Brent crude oil, it's $1,200 a ton for diesel. And that is a very high price. Now, that is a result effectively of four major issues that the oil market has to deal with.

One of them is Hormuz, as just discussed. But then we come to these other three. And these other three are the Bab el-Mandeb, which is the strait on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula that provides entry and exit to the Red Sea. That strait has gained in importance because Saudi Arabia has been redirecting about 4 million barrels a day of crude oil supply that was previously exported via Hormuz. Now through the East-West Pipeline to a terminal near a city called Yanbu, from where it is loaded and mostly sails down south through the Bab el-Mandab to refineries in Asia.

The Bab el-Mandab is a strait that is effectively controlled by the Houthis, which is an Iran-aligned group that controls much of Yemen. And already in [20]24, earlier in [20]25, they've been very effective, controlling tanker traffic through that strait. And in the last sort of week or so, they have said that they will no longer allow Saudi tankers to sail out. And also, that group has executed drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure near the Jazan refinery, near the Yanbu terminal, and overnight also the Abqaiq facility, which is a large oil processing plant.

So, this whole Red Sea situation puts at risk something like an incremental 3.5 million barrels a day of crude.

Then we've had to deal with issues at the CPC terminal, which is again, also a very large oil export terminal. About 1.5-2 million barrels a day of crude is exported from CPC, which is a terminal near the Russian city of Novorossiysk.

Ukraine has been executing drone attacks on tankers that have been trying to load from the CPC terminal. Much of last week, the CPC terminal was out. Over the last 24 hours, a few tankers have loaded again, but it's very unreliable. It's on again, off again. It's a very disrupted flow. In and of itself, a single terminal loading 1.5-2 million barrels a day is very, very large. So, we care.

And then the third issue that the oil market has been dealing with, and this also comes back to this issue about these refined product prices, is very severe tightness in the global refining system. That is an issue of some refineries can't export because they're behind the Strait of Hormuz again.

So, you can say, "Well, isn't that; that's sort of the same problem?" But nevertheless, it expresses it somewhere else. It's partly a problem of, sort of, the Chinese refinery system running very low. But it's recently mostly been driven by Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries. And by now, something like 60 percent of the Russian refining system is out.

And with that, exports of refined products have declined very significantly. There's a gasoline export ban. There's a diesel export ban from Russia. Russia used to be a very large diesel exporter. That is now down to practically zero. And with that, refined product markets have rallied severely on top of the price of crude.

Andrew Sheets: And I think that's interesting [be]cause when we think about the economic impact of oil, while, you know, the price of oil per barrel is often the most kind of visible marker that we have – it's often the refined product that we actually use. You know, a truck is running on diesel. It's not running on crude oil.

And, you know, that cost of diesel, of jet fuel, of gasoline, you know, that is the thing that can often really affect business margins. And the ability to operate and move product around. So, I mean, just give a sense like how much have those diesel prices gone up? And how much further could they rise if you're operating, you know, a trucking company in Europe?

Martijn Rats: Yeah. Look, when supply is inherently scarce, we often ask the question – what is the demand destruction price, right? If you can't supply the stuff quick enough, the physical oil market, be it crude or refined product, must balance.

There are a finite number of molecules in the system, and we can store them for a bit. We can take them out of storage. But when you take storage into account, molecules can't disappear out of nowhere. And they can't create it out of nowhere either. So, the system must balance. And if you can't supply it quick enough, the only way to balance sometimes is through demand destruction.

And then we ask the question, what is the price that effectively causes that to happen? And if you look historically, that is often expressed in crude, something like $140-$150 a barrel. We've seen that before. But those were occasions where refining was not an issue. And then crude needs to do the heavy lifting to drive prices higher.

What we're having at the moment is that refined products need to do it. And so, from experience earlier in the year, back in 2022, some other occasions, the price that destroys diesel demand is probably in the order of $1,400 a ton. In the diesel market, we use tons rather than barrels for historical reasons. Just to make it easy.

But it's about $1,400 a ton, which is about sort of, you know, like $180-$190 per barrel. That really stops diesel demand in its track. At the moment, we're $1,230-$1,240, that sort of level. And so, we are getting close. There is probably a little bit more to go, like another 5 percent, 10 percent, that sort of thing, before you really hit some exceptionally high levels.

But the diesel price, I would argue, is doing exactly that. It's searching for this demand destruction price. It's just if you then take that sort of $160 diesel that we have at the moment, how much do the refiners get versus how much do the crude producers get?

At the moment, the refiners are getting $65- $70 out of that, leaving comparatively little for the crude supplier. But the refined product price is the channel by which the economy is impacted and ultimately also by which demand is eroded.

Andrew Sheets: When we're talking about demand destruction, we're talking about at what price does a trucking company not operate, does not drive as much, you know, does not, you know... We're talking about less activity. And inherently that is, I think a risk to growth. But especially risk to growth in Europe where the starting point for growth is already pretty weak.

Martijn Rats: Yes. So, we are watching as much, how the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refiners are playing out as we are watching, sort of, the Strait of Hormuz.

Andrew Sheets: Martijn, the last thing I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, we've been talking about the Iran conflict since late February. And, you know, we're sitting here in late July. And it's clear that, you know, there was a small normalization in flows as you talked about. But we're back to a place where those flows are nowhere near normal.

And I think the question on everybody's mind is how much longer can this go on before there's a much larger shock to energy prices?

Now, again, you've mentioned we're already seeing some of that shock to diesel, but, you know, a much bigger disruption. What's your current thinking on how much runway the energy system still has?

Martijn Rats: Yeah. It's an excellent question, and it's turned out to be fiendishly hard to answer. My gut feel based on how the data is behaving, based on what we know from history: If this lasts another, sort of, month or two, three, then it's hard to argue that by then the buffers in the system will not have been completely exhausted.

The reason why I think oil analysts have lost a degree of confidence in forecasting this accurately is that there's a lot of unexplained oil that does require some explanation. If you look at the cumulative amount of supply loss from the Middle East since the start of this conflict, easily over 1.5 billion barrels. 1.5 billion barrels in 150 days is an enormous amount.

And yet, the inventory draws that we can find in observable data, they are at best a third of that, maybe 0.5 billion barrels. And so, there's another billion barrels where you say, "Yeah, we had that last year, but we don't have this this year.”

How did we solve that billion-barrel problem? And you can say, "Well, we were a bit oversupplied going into it," and a few other things. But you, sort of, have to conclude, and I think this is also, you know, talking to clients and investors, other market participants. I think this is sort of collectively we're discovering this is that this system of, like, unobservable inventories has to be way bigger.

That is either inventories like in the supply chain, inventories at customers end, or in countries where we generally just have very little data anyway, like in China. And so, the system has been behaving as if already in [20]24 and [20]25 actually, we were putting a lot of oil into these, in storages that are hard to observe – because in that period we had the opposite problem.

We were forecasting large inventory builds, and we couldn't find them all. And now we're forecasting large draws, and we haven't been able to find them all. And so, the system has been behaving as this; the unobservable part of the inventories are way larger.

And… But at some point, they also run out. But because they're hard to observe, we don't know when. And I would guess if we're getting towards the end of the summer by August-September, and we're still in this situation? Yeah, then we're going into the winter. Like, you know, German households objectively have little storage of heating oil.

Andrew Sheets: Mm-hmm.

Martijn Rats: And they need to be rebuilt. And there are a few examples where we do know what customers are doing with their inventories, and they point to a picture where, yeah, by the end of the summer, like, we're running on fumes. And so, look, this – we've been able to patch this up. But it can't go on forever.

Andrew Sheets: Well, Martijn, always a pleasure to, to catch up with you and talk energy markets.

Martijn Rats: Nice to talk to you.

Andrew Sheets: And thank you for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us.

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