Bloomberg: Crude shipments from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will decline from near their highest in a year as summer demand passes its peak, tanker-tracker Oil Movements said.
Bloomberg
By Grant Smith
Crude shipments from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will decline from near their highest in a year as summer demand passes its peak, tanker-tracker Oil Movements said.
The group, which supplies about 40 percent of the world’s oil, will cut exports by 410,000 barrels a day, or 1.7 percent, to 23.95 million barrels a day in the four weeks to Aug. 10, the researcher said today in an e-mailed report. The figures exclude two of OPEC’s 12 members, Angola and Ecuador.
“We’re already over the peak,” Roy Mason, the company’s founder, said today by phone from Halifax, England. “There was a late summer surge but that’s it. From here to September the direction of shipments will be down.”
Refiners typically trim imports at the start of the third quarter while performing maintenance as summer demand for gasoline and diesel ebb. Brent crude traded for about $107 a barrel today on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London, having slipped almost 4 percent this year.
Middle Eastern shipments will drop by 2.2 percent to 17.6 million barrels a day to Aug. 10, compared with 18 million in the month to July 13, according to Oil Movements. That figure includes non-OPEC nations Oman and Yemen.
Crude on board tankers will increase by 1.7 percent to 495.6 million barrels versus 487.4 million, data from Oil Movements show. The researcher calculates the volumes by tallying tanker bookings. Its figures exclude crude held on vessels for storage.
OPEC’s members are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. It will next meet in Vienna on Dec. 4.
