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19 Historical Oil Disruptions, And How No.20 Will Shock Markets
19 Historical Oil Disruptions, And How No.20 Will Shock Markets
Albert Einstein once wrote that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Were he alive today, he would be repeating the line to anyone who would listen, especially the reporters on cable news channels such as CNBC. He might add that the world’s policymakers always approach oil market disruptions in the same way: predicting there will be no impact on prices.
Einstein would then point out that the policymakers are consistently wrong. A hefty price boost has followed every disruption.
The world has experienced nineteen oil market disruptions over the last forty years. In a paper published in March 2018, I chronicled these events and noted that the maximum price increase was predictable. Last Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo initiated the twentieth disruption. The consequences are projected here.
Start, though, with the energy policy insanity. In each of the disruptions since 1973, I have noted the following regarding government officials.
State Department representatives always say something like “the US Department of State remains in contact with our partners to reduce the risk of supply disruptions. There is sufficient oil supply in the global markets that countries can access.”
OPEC officials always spout some version of “the oil market remains well-supplied, with the recent price driven by geopolitics, not fundamentals.”
Nothing has changed. Last week Reuters offered this quote from the State Department’s Brian Hook, the person running the Iran sanctions program:
“There’s roughly a million barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian crude (exports) left, and there is plenty of supply in the market to ease that transition and maintain stable prices,” said Brian Hook, U.S. Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of State, speaking in a call with reporters.
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The Next Big Threat For Oil Comes From China
The Next Big Threat For Oil Comes From China
There is a widespread concern in the world regarding China’s decelerating economic growth. The slowdown, if it continues, threatens economic activity almost everywhere. Growth in Germany, for example, has already cooled due to its exports of high-quality machinery to China dropping precipitously.
Those in the oil market also worry about China. The country’s economic growth has been a key driver of global crude oil consumption. Indeed, China accounts for one-third of the International Energy Agency’s projected 2019 increase in world oil use.
Weak Chinese economic growth is not the end of the oil market’s prospective ills, however. Few recognize the additional trouble on tap from the Chinese independent refiners affectionally known as “teapots.” The danger occurs because lower oil demand growth in China comes just when independent refining capacity there is rising. The capacity growth has been financed primarily by debt, most likely supplied by China’s alternative lenders. As demand slows, these refiners will turn to international markets, dumping products in Singapore, the Americas, or Europe to earn hard cash. In doing so, they could plunge the global refining industry into a serious recession and drive crude prices down sharply.
This will not be the first time that refineries in Asia caused a crisis in the oil sector. In 1997, Korean refiners did the same during the Asian financial collapse. That incident is described in the December 1997 Oil Market Intelligence (OMI). The report begins by noting that Korean refiners had begun to seek exports markets before the crisis hit “mostly to employ 620,000 b/d of new refining capacity that came on stream since late 1966.” The effort intensified as domestic consumption collapsed:
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