Oil Supply Risk

[dan_s]

IMO speculators, who actually determine oil prices, are not considering how exposed the world's oil supplies are to violence. Just in the last few days there has been 600,000 barrels per day of supply taken off the market. That is more oil than Iran will bring back to the market this year. - Dan

On March 4, Reuters reported a sophisticated attack on a sub-sea pipeline in Nigeria's Delta might herald a return to the kind of widespread militant violence that crippled the oil industry in Africa's top producer less than a decade ago. Reuters reported that attacks on oil facilities have been on the rise in the swamps since President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to shake up a fraud-ridden amnesty program for rebels who stopped blowing up pipelines in 2009 in exchange for cash and generous contracts. This attack hit a Royal Dutch Shell (RDS-NC) underwater pipeline and forcing the company to shut down its 250,000 b/d Forcados export terminal for several weeks.

March 7 (Reuters) - Oil exports from northern Iraq fell by almost half to an average of 350,067 barrels per day (bpd) in February due to an outage of the pipeline to Turkey, the Kurdistan region's Ministry of Natural Resources said on Monday. The pipeline, which carries crude from fields in the Kurdish region and Kirkuk to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has been idle since Feb. 17 as a result of "circumstances" inside Turkey, the ministry said. Turkey's energy ministry said on Feb. 27 it had begun work to repair the pipeline, and an industry source based in the Kurdistan region told Reuters on Sunday the work would be completed "in a day or two".