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Almost three dozen ships \u2014 scattered in waters from Long Beach to the San Francisco Bay \u2014 are mostly acting as floating storage for oil that\u2019s going unused as the coronavirus pandemic shutters businesses and takes drivers off the road. Marathon Petroleum Corp.\u2019s refinery in Martinez, California, has been idled and others, including Chevron Corp.\u2019s El Segundo refinery, have curtailed crude processing as the state orders residents to stay at home.<\/p>\n
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The more than 20 million barrels of crude is the highest volume of crude to ever float off the West Coast at one time, according to Paris-based Kpler SAS, which tracks tanker traffic. About three quarters of those tankers are holding oil in storage, meaning they have been floating steadily for seven days, also a record.<\/p>\n
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Storage has become increasingly scarce as a growing supply glut collides with collapsing fuel demand. As traditional tanks have filled, oil has been pushed onto tankers to float off Singapore, the U.S. Gulf Coast and, now, the U.S. West Coast.<\/p>\n
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The Seaexpress, a tanker that normally carries fuel, is currently holding crude for Royal Dutch Shell Plc. for at least a month in Puget Sound, Washington, after data on the ships draft indicated it loaded up at the company\u2019s Anacortes refinery.<\/p>\n
gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Almost three dozen ships \u2014 scattered in waters from Long Beach to the San Francisco Bay \u2014 are mostly acting as floating storage for oil that\u2019s going unused as the coronavirus pandemic shutters businesses and takes drivers off the road. Marathon Petroleum Corp.\u2019s refinery in Martinez, California, has been idled and others, including Chevron Corp.\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2825,1579,1407,1132,166,1408],"class_list":["post-8442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-california","tag-coast","tag-floating","tag-grows","tag-oil","tag-storage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/8443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}