Veldig interessant diskusjon her
Has OECD oil consumption peaked?
og her
Oilwatch Monthly April 2009.
Vel, diskusjon og diskusjon, mest en lang monolog av memmel. memmel har etter eget utsagn "severe dyslexia", så noen setninger må leses tre ganger, men det er verd det.
Essensen i argumentet hans er at dersom de rapporterte tallene for produksjon, etterspørsel og ikke minst mengden olje på lager stemmer, så skulle oljeprisen vært langt lavere enn den er i dag - mellom 10 og 20 dollar. 50$ som vi ligger og vaker rundt nå er ikke billig, selv om det er lavere enn det var på topp.
memmel skriver:
Next obviously your report recognizes the contradiction developing OECD inventories supposedly rose while demand declined and the rest of the world which was supposedly increasing in demand and also theoretically capable of outbidding the OECD for oil had repeated reports of shortages.
And the price continued to rise.
At this point one begins to even wonder about OECD reporting forget the rest of the world. One wonders how reliable even these figures are. I've begun to seriously question OECD inventory numbers and what I find is that when the price of oil is volatile the oil trade in general moves from a direct trade i.e a oil refinery buying oil from a OPEC country on contract to a three way trade. Speculator buying and storing oil and then later selling it to a refinery.
More cargoes tend to be sold on the spot market and as often as not these end up in the hands of speculators reselling the cargo.
Whats important is this changes the accounting since oil production and consumption becomes disjoint and in general these speculators store oil closer to or in the final market countries. In the case of the direct trade storage would tend to be in the producing country with the refiner only requesting more oil as needed and maintaining a reasonable cushion. Thus the two way trade is a JIT model with storage local to the producer and the three way trade moves storage towards the consumer.
Thus overall these supposed storage builds in the OECD are probably simply and artifact of the changes in trade relationships with strongly rising oil prices.
Producers find that they have no shortage of buyers in the form of speculators and thus they store little oil the speculators and real consumers then use arbitrate the final price.
In general you have no real build in overall storage whats happening is instead of oil producers storing the oil and eating the costs and not reporting their storage levels you simply have oil moving into storage that is reported. Given that the oil is speculative and may change nominal ownership several times one has to wonder how well the actual amount physical amount of real oil vs the number of paper trades is resolved. You get situations similar to the gold markets where the relationship between the amount of physical gold and paper trade in gold becomes a bit murky.
Hvor stor er lagerkapasiteten for olje rundt om i verden, egentlig? Spørsmålet dukker stadig opp på TOD, men det ser ikke ut til at noen vet eller klarer å lage en god oversikt. Mange er overrasket over at det eksisterer lagerkapasitet for all oljen som rapporteres lagret nå... To poenger her: En, det er mulig memmel har rett i at det er mye papirolje i omløp; to, det har eksistert en betydelig lagerkapasitet (i vesten) som har ligget brakk de siste 10+ årene. Det igjen betyr jo at oljebransjen har hatt sin fulle hyre med å møte etterspørselen fra dag til dag i ganske lang tid... og at overgangen til Just-In-Time - levering kanskje ikke har vært av effektivitetshensyn, men på grunn av at kapasiteten har vært strekt til bristepunktet?
Memmel fortsetter:
And now we finally can get to production. Given all the above it becomes increasingly clear that production numbers from most producers have consisted of a large surplus of paper barrels. Often the same paper barrels owned buy various physical speculators. Mexico for example has sold a lot of paper barrels. Other countries such as Saudi Arabia claim they don't engage in speculation sure...
With the recent drop in oil prices producers don't need to sell as many speculative barrels in fact they are now at least in a position to report true production levels at some point even under report. However since I believe the production numbers where already heavily distorted they would need to realistically back down from false claims and at some point will probably report the real production numbers at least for a time.
I think we have hit that point on the producer side. On the speculator side you have the problem to keep the contango going even as producers report lower and lower production numbers you have to report ever increasing paper barrels.
At some point of course this simply does not work the paper speculative barrels disappear storage falls and prices increase and the speculators have to sell all of their physical barrels as the market enters backwardation. If production does not meet demand then you have a price war again.
At the end of the day all that seems to have happened is that the financially induced fall in prices seems to have given speculators a chance to control even more real physical oil bought up as the rapid crash of the economy resulted in a temporary supply glut. Given that they paid little for these barrels they can keep the triad trade going for a while as they offer lower prices than most producers are willing to offer. The beauty is a producer is now forced to put a cargo on the spot market and sometimes sell at a discount as the front month is highly volatile so the traders are still able to pick up the odd distressed spot sale from time to time given a volatile market.
If you noticed in this long tirade at no point in time was the amount of physical oil increasing in fact for all this to work you must have a steady persistent and probably steep decline in physical production. Speculators are putting up billions of dollars and paying millions for storage and I don't think Goldman and friends will do this unless its a pretty sure bet. Maybe they eventually get burned but given the above I doubt it.
Innlegg
