Oil industry woes grow as storage levels hit ‘critical level’
By Myra P. Saefong
Published: Feb 8, 2016 5:23 p.m. ET
Bloomberg
Storage tanks at Cushing, Okla. are filling up.
The storage tanks at Cushing, Okla., the delivery point for the New York Mercantile Exchange crude contract, are edging closer to their limits, raising a new set of problems for an industry that has already suffered from a 70% drop in prices in the past year and a half.
Cushing, which represents about 13% of the nation’s oil storage, has a working capacity of about 73.014 million barrels of crude oil, according to data from Sept. 2015, the latest available from the Energy Information Administration.
U.S. Energy Information Administration
As of the week ended Jan. 29, there was 64.174 million barrels of oil in storage at Cushing, so it is at about 88% full.
“Where inventories count the most—at the Nymex terminal complex in Cushing, Oklahoma—storage is already at a critical level,” said Stephen Schork, in The Schork Report published Monday. “Approximately 6 out of 7 barrels available storage capacity at the Nymex hub are now full.”
The report highlighted an article from Reuters that discussed delays in crude deliveries from storage tanks at Cushing because there wasn’t enough room to drain existing tanks to blend oil to meet West Texas Intermediate crude CLH6, +1.38%specifications.
Cushing serves as a blending station, where crude oil from the midcontinent is mixed to the specific grades required by different refineries, according to StateImpact Oklahoma.
‘We soon might be in a situation that we have so much oil, that we don’t have enough of the right kind of oil.’
Stephen Schork, The Schork Report
“We soon might be in a situation that we have so much oil, that we don’t have enough of the right kind of oil,” Schork said.
But that’s not the only problem.
Richard Hastings, macro strategist at Seaport Global Securities, said building more tanks would take time and there would be questions over how the cost of tanks would be shared across the supply chain.
Meanwhile, the market is dealing with a “constant high volume” of crude oil coming from the floating storage at the Gulf Coast, the Canadian crudes coming by rail to the U.S. and domestic production, said Hastings.
“If the volumes get too high, then the intermediate delivery steps—moving large volumes from tanks to pipelines—could be difficult if the local hub’s pipeline capacity is constrained,” he said.
Hastings doesn’t expect Cushing to ever reach its working storage capacity because crude oil would back up in the rest of the Midwest, especially the Gulf Coast, instead.
“It’s the pipeline connections from Cushing to the Gulf Coast refiners that make the Cushing-Gulf Coast dynamics pretty obvious now,” he said. “Cushing capacity problems will push Gulf Coast volumes higher, which in turn create pricing problem for major global benchmarks.”
Ironically, in a MarketWatch story published nearly a year ago, analysts forecast that with the U.S. running out of space to store its glut of crude-oil supplies, prices for the commodity could sink to as low as $30 a barrel.
Read:Storage dearth may drive oil prices to $30
On Monday, WTI oil futures settled at $29.69 a barrel
