{"id":8674,"date":"2020-04-25T09:38:21","date_gmt":"2020-04-25T06:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/oil-market-so-glutted-traders-use-tiny-barges-to-store-fuels\/8674\/"},"modified":"2020-04-25T09:38:21","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T06:38:21","slug":"oil-market-so-glutted-traders-use-tiny-barges-to-store-fuels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/oil-market-so-glutted-traders-use-tiny-barges-to-store-fuels\/8674\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil Market So Glutted Traders Use Tiny Barges to Store Fuels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p>For weeks now, oil and fuel traders have been <a href=\"https:\/\/gcaptain.com\/traders-chase-storage-space-in-world-awash-with-oil\/\">clamoring<\/a> for almost any storage facilities they can hire, filling on-land tanks and even ocean-going supertankers. But the deployment of barges \u2014 tiny vessels by comparison \u2014 has taken the hunt for places to stash cargoes to a new dimension.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are storing distillates in seven kinds of vessels right now, from barges all the way to supertankers,\u201d said Ben Luckock, the co-head of oil trading at Trafigura Group, one of the world\u2019s top commodity merchants. \u201cThis is becoming a freight issue\u201d<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>The shipping market is increasingly reflecting an oil industry that\u2019s in <a href=\"https:\/\/gcaptain.com\/oil-prices-crash-below-zero-for-first-time-in-history-amid-pandemic\/\">distress<\/a> because of the hit to demand that\u2019s been caused by the coronavirus, causing a huge glut. Rates to transport refined fuels have\u00a0surged to new highs\u00a0this week in part because so many tankers are being deployed to store cargoes, a phenomenon that had already afflicted the crude oil market.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Barges in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp trading hub, or ARA for short, might typically carry anywhere from about 2,000 to 6,000 tons of cargo, making them minnows when compared to the tankers that routinely deliver the world\u2019s oil and fuels. The largest ocean-going vessels often haul more than 280,000 tons of cargo.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Riverlake Barging, a firm that brokers barge shipments to, from and around ARA, confirmed that a handful of vessels have been booked for <a href=\"https:\/\/gcaptain.com\/forced-to-store-fuel-at-sea-oil-refiners-at-breaking-point\/\">floating storage<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>\u201cEveryone is checking the possibility of floating storage,\u201d Jelle Vreeman, a broker at Riverlake said. \u201cBecause inland storages are so full, there\u2019s no alternative to store it on land, so that\u2019s why they use barges now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>A lack of recent activity in the area has made the barge freight rates relatively cheap, helping to make the ships a more attractive proposition for storage, he said.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Barges have previously been used as floating storage in ARA, but normally only for short-term logistical purposes, such as needing to free up space in a storage tank. Now, the situation is more structural. There is a lot of interest and it is being done for economic reasons, Vreeman said.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are seeing high demand for barge storage in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp region for a range of oil products and a range of time periods,\u201d said Lars Van Wageningen, operations manager at Insights Global, a firm that monitors the area\u2019s inventories. \u201cCompanies are looking for storage to play the market and make a profit in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>\u2013With assistance from\u00a0Rachel Graham,\u00a0Alex Longley,\u00a0Alix Steel\u00a0and\u00a0Javier Blas.<\/p>\n<p>gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For weeks now, oil and fuel traders have been clamoring for almost any storage facilities they can hire, filling on-land tanks and even ocean-going supertankers. But the deployment of barges \u2014 tiny vessels by comparison \u2014 has taken the hunt for places to stash cargoes to a new dimension. \u201cWe are storing distillates in seven &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[5359,1681,5357,1083,166,3037,5358,3542],"class_list":["post-8674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-barges","tag-fuels","tag-glutted","tag-market","tag-oil","tag-store","tag-tiny","tag-traders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8674","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=8674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/8675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}