As demand declines, oil tankers lower anchors

NEW YORK

Supertankers that once raced around the world to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for oil are now parked offshore, fully loaded, anchors down, their crews killing time. In the United States, vast storage farms for oil are almost out of room.

As demand for crude has plummeted, the world suddenly finds itself awash in oil that has nowhere to go.

It’s been less than a year since oil prices hit record highs. But now producers and traders are struggling with the new reality: The world wants less oil, not more. And turning off the spigot is about as easy as turning around one of those tankers.

So oil companies and investors are stashing crude, waiting for demand to rise and the bear market to end so they can turn a profit later.

Meanwhile, oil-producing countries such as Iran have pumped millions of barrels of their own crude into idle tankers, effectively taking crude off the market to halt declining prices that are devastating their economies.

Traders always have played a game of store and sell, bringing oil to market when it can fetch the best price. They say this time is different because of how fast the bottom fell out of the oil market.

“Nobody expected this,” said Antoine Halff, an analyst with Newedge. “The majority of people out there thought the market would keep rising to $200, even $250, a barrel. They were tripping over each other to pick a higher forecast.”

Now the strategy is storage. Anyone who can buy cheap oil and store it might be able to sell it at a premium later, when the global economy ramps up again.

The oil tanks that surround Cushing, Okla., in a sprawling network that holds 10 percent of the nation’s oil, have been swelling for months. Exactly how close they are to full is a closely guarded secret, but analysts who cover the industry say Cushing is approaching capacity.

It’s the same scene at the four other massive storage sites in the U.S., complexes on the East Coast, Gulf Coast, West Coast and near the Rocky Mountains.

Some oil is ending up in giant ships and staying there. On these supertankers, rented by oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, there is little for crews to do but paint and repaint the decks to pass time.

More than 30 tankers, each with the ability to move 2 million barrels of oil from port to port, now serve as little more than floating storage tanks. They are moored across the globe, from the Texas coast to the calm waters off Europe and Nigeria.

“It gets expensive to do this,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading Corp. “If you’re sitting on a bunch of oil, and you’re stuck paying storage and insurance, and you can’t find a buyer, you may have to sell it at a discount just to get rid of it.”

On the other hand, as storage units on land have filled up, the companies that own the tankers have profited. Tanker companies charge an average of $75,000 a day, three times as much as last summer, to hold crude, said Douglas Mavrinac, an analyst with Jefferies & Co.

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