Tankers Wait a Month as Venezuela Hits an Oil Export Ceiling
Tankers Wait a Month as Venezuela Hits an Oil Export Ceiling Julianne Geiger is a veteran energy journalist and market analyst with more than a decade of experience covering the global oil and gas sector.
Her… Venezuela has plenty of oil buyers again.
What it does not have is enough functioning port infrastructure to get them their crude.
Tankers are waiting as long as 30 days to load Venezuelan oil as aging terminals, power outages and crude-quality problems create a de facto ceiling on exports, according to Reuters.
That ceiling appears to be around 1.25 million barrels per day.
PDVSA and its partners have been unable to push exports meaningfully above that level in recent months despite rising production, inventory drawdowns and strong demand for Venezuelan heavy crude.
The bottleneck is particularly awkward for Washington, which has been pushing torevive Venezuelan productionand exports following the removal of Nicolas Maduro in January.
More than 500,000 bpd of Venezuelan crude is already heading to U.S.
Energy Department officials, much of it to Gulf Coast plants designed specifically to process the country’s heavy, sour barrels.
Traders Vitol and Trafigura have exported more than140 million barrelsof Venezuelan crude and fuel since January under an agreement with Washington.
Getting additional barrels onto ships is becoming the problem.
Jose, which handles roughly 70% of Venezuela’s exports, has suffered loading interruptions caused by equipment failures, power outages and quality problems.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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